Book Review: Mistress of Spices
According to Ayurveda, every spice has its own properties, and they help cure aliments, alter the mood and boost certain traits. This is the premise of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “The Mistress of Spices”. Tilottama is an Indian woman who runs a spice store in a small town in the United States. People come to her store to purchase spices and other staples, and is able to divine their fears, and circumstances and prescribe spices that would cure them.
The author uses the many people who flock to her store with told and untold burdens to talk about the many issues faced by Indian immigrants. She talks about racism, patriarchy and about how children brought up in the Unites States have values different from those of their parents. While India is yet to recognise marital rape as a crime even today, even in this book written in the late 1990s, she calls out sexual coercion and emotional abuse. She describes in great detail the plight of women who hold jobs, contribute to the family income and yet are expected to run their household and perform caregiving functions, long before the term “emotional labour” gained currency. However, what was slightly disappointing to me was that she only talks about problems specific to Indian immigrants, while ignoring generic issues which everyone faces. This leads me to wonder if she was writing for a specific audience which expects an Indian writer to only write about Indians?
Before becoming the “Mistress of Spices”, a person has to take an oath to not get involved with the people she is serving, and to certainly avoid falling in love herself. In a predictable twist, she is insanely attracted to a man who is somehow able to see through her disguise as an old woman. I would have liked the central romance to be developed move, but it remains rather superficial. There are too many stories and though each of them is tied up she doesn’t go deep into all of them, which is rather unsatisfying.
For me, however, the greatest let down was in the fact that she uses magic realism, but holds back on exploring it to the full- magic realism doesn’t advance the plot, it merely embellishes it.
It is likely that my review is a little biased because the book was written nearly three decades back, and writing has changed considerably in the intervening years. Today, we have learned to demand crisper writing and tighter editing, and it is perhaps not fair to judge a book through today’s lens. It has an interesting storyline which is told through deeply feminist lens. I would certainly recommend the book with the caveat that you go into it with limited expectations.
