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name on my forehead. My Mistress name, finally and forever, after so many changes in who I am. My true-name that I am never to tell to any but the sisterhood. Her finger is cool and moves smooth as oil. The air fills with the clean, astringent fragrance of
til
seeds.
    “Remember this too: Tilottama, disobedient at the last, fell. And was banished to earth to live as a mortal for seven lives. Seven mortal lives of illness and age, of people turning in disgust from her twisted, leprous limbs.”
    “But I will not fall, Mother.”
    No hint of shaking in my voice. My heart is filled with passion for the spices, my ears with the music of our dance together. My blood with our shared power.
    I need no pitiful mortal man to love.
    I believe this. Wholly.

 
    Give me your hand. Open, then shut. Feel.
    Pebble-hard fenugreek lies tight and closed in the center of your palm, color of sand at the bottom of an old creek. But put it in water and it will bloom free.
    Bite the swollen kernels between your teeth and taste its bitter sweetness. Taste of waterweeds in a wild place, the cry of gray geese. Fenugreek Tuesday’s spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain. Spice for days when I want to huddle into a quilt stitched with
peepul
leaves and tell stories like on the island. Except here who would I tell them to.
    Fenugreek, I asked your help when Ratna came to me burning from the poison in her womb, legacy of her husband’s roving. And when Ramaswamy turned from his wife of twenty years to a newer pleasure.
    Listen to fenugreek’s song:
I am fresh as river wind to the tongue, planting desire in a plot turned barren
.
    Yes I called to you when Alok who loves men showed me the lesions opening avid as mouths on his skin and said “I guess this is it.” When Binita raised to me her face like a singed flower. Binita with a lump like a nugget of lead in her breast and the doctors saying cut, and the look in her husband’s eyes as he paced and paced the store saying “What shall I do, please.”
    I fenugreek who renders the body sweet again, ready for loving
.
    Fenugreek
methi
, speckled seed first sown by Shabari, oldest woman in the world. The young scorn you, thinking they will never need. But one day. Sooner than they think.
    All of them, yes. Even the bougainvillea girls.

     
    The bougainvillea girls enter in a flock, like dragonflies at noon. Their sudden laughter peals over me. Warm salt waves that take the breath and pull you to drowning. They float through the musty dark of the store, glistery dustmotes on a ray of light. And for the first time I am ashamed and wish everything shiny and new.
    The bougainvillea girls have hair polished as ebony, coiled in agile braids. Or rippling like mountain water around upturned faces so confident you know nothing bad has ever happened to them.
    They wear jangly bangles in rainbow colors and earrings that swing against the smooth sides of their necks. Their feet arched high in thin glittery heels, their long swaying legs. Their painted nails like purple bougainvillea flowers. Their lips also.
    Not for them the dullness of rice-flour-beans-cumin-coriander. They want pistachios for
pulao
, and poppy seeds for
rogan josh
, which they will prepare looking at a book.
    The bougainvillea girls don’t see me, not even when they raise their voices to ask “Where’s the
amchur,”
and “Is the
rasmalai
fresh, are you sure.” Blackbird voices pitched high as for the deaf, or the feeble-minded.
    For a moment I am angry. Fools, I think. Blind fluttering mascara eyes. My hand curls in a fist around the bay leaves they have thrown so carelessly onto the counter.
    I could make them empresses. Oceans of oil and honey tobathe in, sparkling palaces of rock-sugar. Leaf of water-hyacinth laid on the palm to turn their touch to gold. Unguent of lotus root touched to the nipples for men to lie enslaved at their feet. If I wished.
    Or I could—
    They think themselves so special. Fortune’s daughters