In her struggles, she finds herself falling in love with the lovely man, and breaks many of the rules of a mistress of spices in order to help him and to be near him. However, in Raven's case, he is a Native American who is struggling with is lost identity, and Tilo struggles to know how to help him. To this mix, enters an attractive young man named Raven, also struggling with his own identity.

Much of the novel introduced different characters who were struggling with the cultures they loved, for the changes they saw coming over their families as immigrants. Given the guise of the old woman, Tilo worked to help immigrants, working to make a place for themselves in the United States, to find ways of staying connected to their culture and sense of identity, as well as finding peace with their new world. According to the story, Tilo was actually a young woman who was trained to help people through the spices she was the mistress over. I was eager to see how it stacked up to the novel I loved and knew so well!Īs a quick synopsis, the story centers around the character Tilo, which is an old woman who runs a spice shop in San Francisco. Then to hear that the novel had been turned into a film, and that Tilo (the protagonist) was being played by famous Aishwarya Rai, really excited me. So, I share this why? Well, I wanted to be clear on the fact that I feel a certain closeness to Divakaruni's novel that comes through hours spent pouring over its pages and their meanings. Back in 2005, I presented a paper at the the British Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies Conference in Savannah, Georgia on 'Threads of Indian-ness in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices.' As a graduate student, I had spent weeks, and then months working with Divakaruni's novel, not only in my seminar course that we were reading it in, but also in preparation for this conference.

The mistress of spices novel