The Mistress Of Spices: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize

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Next, the characters and their emotions don’t somehow seem to tug at your heart as any intense tale is supposed to. Everything seems so artificial, run-of-the-mill and boringly regular. You could have seen such tales in your TV soap operas. A first novel by the author of the short story collection, Arranged Marriage , The Mistress of Spices is a mystical tale told by Tilo, a young Indian woman in an old woman's body who has been trained in the secret powers of spices. Her special knowledge leads her to Oakland, California where she uses it to help the local Indian community by opening a spice shop from which she administers spices as curatives. Tilo can see into people's hearts and minds but it is a mistress's duty to keep herself at a distance, "not too far nor too near, in calm kindness poised." However, Tilo is unable to obey her charge, and she becomes emotionally involved with her customers as they struggle with the demands of their families, the clash of the old way versus the American way, racism, abusive husbands-all of the complexities of living in the modern world. Divakaruni chose to write The Mistress of Spices in the first person present tense. Does this point of view add or detract from the story? Finally, a spoiler. If you are eager to know whether the spices punish her, sorry, they don’t. They ravage most of the Oakland area through earthquake and fire, kill innocent people and destroy their property, but let go of our protagonist with just a little injury to her forehead, because you know what? She accepted her punishment in her heart. Dafuq is the word that came to my mind here. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. I read this when I was in grad school, and it really made me examine my own role as a woman of color living in the U.S. It made me want to start writing about my own experiences. It made me think that perhaps I, too, had something worthwhile to write about.

What do the characters in Divakaruni's novels and stories lose and gain as they become more "American"?Tilo ends up in the San Francisco Bay Area in a store called "Spice Bazaar". Tilo's customers include Haroun, a cab driver (Nitin Ganatra), a grandfather (Anupam Kher) dealing with an American-born granddaughter Geeta (Padma Lakshmi), Kwesi, a man trying to impress his girlfriend (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Jagjit, a teenager trying to fit in at school (Sonny Gill Dulay). The lady of the shop's story begins in India a few centuries before where she is born as Nayan Tara, not the prettiest of the children, a gifted child who dominates the household since her magic powers enriches the family in their small village near the river. Tilo says, "Better hate spoken than hate silent." Does hate spoken achieve the effect Tilo intends or not? Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a devout Hindu, attended a convent school in India run by Irish nuns before she came to the United States in 1976. While most of Sister of My Heart takes place in Calcutta, Divakaruni explores the immigrant experience through Indian women in American cities in both The Mistress of Spices and Arranged Marriage.

What role does physical beauty play in this story? In Tilo’s feelings about her body? About Raven? About the bougainvillea girls? Spellbinding and hypnotizing, The Mistress of Spices is a tale of joy and sorrow and one special woman's magical powers. ( From the publisher.)In Divakaruni's stories, women are wives and mothers, but the men are portrayed primarily as husbands, not fathers. How are the men's roles in the novels similar to or different from those in the stories? It also won't dramatically change your life either, but will leave you with a feeling of growing old is inevitable, but growing up is optional. Sometimes we just have to release that innocent young girl in ourselves who never actually deserted us and have her day in our minds. As a young girl, Tilo was initiated as one of several young Mistresses of Spices by the First Mother, who warns the girls about certain rules they must follow, or face dire consequences. They are instructed never to leave their respective stores all around the world, physically touch the skin of the people they meet, or use the great and incomprehensible strength and power of the Spices to their own ends. Divakaruni did not write fiction until she finished her doctoral studies in English at the University of California at Berkeley. In speaking of her path to fiction writing, she notes that academic writing didn’t "touch my heart. It had nothing to do with my real life as an immigrant woman in America." Instead, she says of her fiction: "It was important for me to start writing about my own reality and that of my community." The first book of this author that I had read was ‘The Palace of Illusions’, a book on the famed Mahabharata character of Panchali, closely resembling the renowned work of Irawati Karve, ‘Yuganta’. She had done a pretty decent job there, having already got the blueprint for Panchali’s emotions laid out before her by Vyasa. But this work is something that she can claim to be entirely her own. So, I was expecting to see her real potential excel in here. And, I have been disappointed badly.