The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

What can be more tasty than a curry made from mixing different spices? Yes playing with spices and experimenting on food is something I always do, sometimes I get excellent result and sometimes end up spoiling the taste

I watched the movie Mistress of spices, Aishwarya Rai (as Tilo) and Dylan McDermott (as Doug aka Raven) long back, but today I read the novel, which was adapted into movie. A mythical, romantic, and spicy story of spice and the mistress of spices who is old, who has the gift of special powers to talk to spices and use it for welfare of human beings. Novel describes about Indians who came to America in search of different things. Tilo, the mistress of spices solve everybody’s problem by giving them different spices. But she can not use them for herself or fall in love with anybody. In spite of all the warnings she falls in love with a man. From here story is mainly about how she will fight back her desire for mortal life and love? How spices will punish her, will they leave her and go forever? What her Old one, who made her mistress of spices will do to stop her?

There are lot of difference between book and the movie. Movie does not say about pirates coming in ships and taking her away from her parents, it is pictured as a group of bandits. Movie does not show  any serpents helping her to reach the Island. Main difference is in the movie “Mistress” is not old lady, she is young and beautiful, there is no earthquake and powers are still with her. I felt the novel kind of boring in between.

This time for my surprise I liked the movie than book. In book it seemed so unreal, but in movie everything was so clear and seemed real to me.