Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (24 page)

Seckin had been asking me intermittently to speak to a few young patients who were going through the same thing I had gone through. These women had been afraid to get the surgery, or just had been having a hard time for whatever reason because of endometriosis. It is a very isolating disease. He felt that if they could talk with a neutral person outside their family who had been through it, they would feel less alone. They could also see through my journey that there was hope and they could, perhaps, feel better.

Once, a young girl stopped me in Seckin’s office as I walked out after an appointment. She was very excited, explaining what a die-hard fan of
Top Chef
she was. I could feel the remains of the K-Y Jelly from the vaginal sonogram I’d just had seeping into the crotch of my underwear. The girl quoted several of my quips from Judges’ Table and listed her favorite episodes, many of which I had trouble remembering at that very awkward moment. It was the only time I could think of that I wasn’t altogether pleased to accept a compliment on behalf of my show.

Seckin called later that evening to ask if I would get in touch with the same young girl. She had initially been helped by the pill, he said, but now needed surgery and was reluctant to go through with it. She had what seemed like a rather tenuous relationship with her mother, at least from what the doctor could tell by their behavior in his office during visits. Seckin thought that she would respond to my reaching out because she was such a fan.

He connected me with other patients a few times, informally and ad hoc, and it had proved therapeutic, helpful in some way. Seckin had already organized a small patients’ support group and I met some of his other ex-patients who helped out. There were lawyers, financial professionals, women from many walks of life all suffering from the same disease and giving one another support and listening when no one else would. Seckin saw the effects of our efforts and was seized by the idea that we should cofound a formal organization dedicated to endometriosis research and education.

At first, I resisted. I didn’t know anything about running a foundation and from what I could tell, the doc was always busy and his practice was overflowing, so I wasn’t sure how we were going to pull it off. And, too, I felt that talking about endometriosis was frankly the most unsexy thing in the world, that it would seal the coffin on any appeal I had left in the world past forty. I was so conditioned into thinking, ever since those early
modeling days in Spain, that if I drew the curtain back on such an uncomfortable and almost disgusting thing that had been happening to me all along, I would extinguish any interest or attraction the public had in me. It was embarrassing to even consider talking in print and onstage about my illness. And who would listen anyway? But I had seen how profoundly my life had changed since the surgeries: my pain, my discomfort, my moods, my ability to handle stress. My gratitude for Seckin’s treatment made me want to talk to each of those patients in his office. Seckin had alleviated so much pain and suffering for me that I couldn’t in good conscience say no to his foundation proposal. Still, he lobbied for a whole six months before I finally acquiesced.

And so, in April 2009 we launched the Endometriosis Foundation of America, with funds cobbled together largely from Seckin, along with a lot of goodwill. We formed a board mainly out of the most active members of his patients’ group, and asked his wife to help out, too. He and I worked our Rolodexes to death and begged everyone we knew to help and buy tickets to a fund-raiser we were calling “the Blossom Ball,” which we threw together in sixty days. It felt good to channel my anger toward a cause and turn my pain into something positive. I had to learn how to speak about my illness publicly, and the practice I’d had in the minicounseling sessions with Seckin’s other patients was not enough. But I learned quickly. I had no choice. To try to get the word out, we all thought I needed to tell my story with candor to one big news organization to garner support and interest in our mission. We needed to raise awareness so other women wouldn’t have to go through what I had.

I asked my publicist and friend Christina if she could help spread the word about our new foundation. This was much different from the usual press junkets of talk shows and magazine interviews she worked on for
Top Chef,
but she was happy to try. I started telling her all about it and she helped me hone my message and navigate how to tell a very personal and,
quite frankly, squeamish story to strangers in a public forum. I practiced on the phone with her late into the night before our fund-raiser, and tried to subdue the considerable embarrassment I felt about, well . . . talking about my vagina.

I agreed to an interview with
Newsweek.
I had already been on their cover and felt they would treat the interview fairly and respectfully. The first Blossom Ball was a success, mostly because we shanghaied our friends and colleagues into helping. Whoopi Goldberg, who, it turned out, was a sufferer, agreed to speak at the last minute and Fareed Zakaria agreed to MC. I was very nervous about speaking about such private things to a journalist. I had been burned so much, especially as it related to my private life, that I felt very shaky about the whole thing. But I kept thinking of my young cousin. I kept thinking of all the young girls I passed in the street, knowing that 10 percent of them were walking around feeling like I did every month for years and years. I thought of the women who lived in the public housing near my place downtown who probably didn’t have the health insurance I had, or the regular checkups, how they could afford even less than I could to miss all those days of work. I thought of my mother on her heating pad, how a doctor had removed her appendix. I thought of the rejection on my ex-husband’s face and his utter lack of understanding or empathy or even belief that I was actually in the pain I said I was in.

After the Blossom Ball, I went off to film in Las Vegas. Teddy flew in weekly for overnight visits. I had abandoned the use of any birth control as unnecessary. I was in a very bad mood for most of the filming in Vegas that season. I’m sure the residual hormones used for harvesting my eggs had something to do with it. It was tiring and the arid and airless atmosphere of Vegas left me dry of any enthusiasm. I had also decided to quit smoking once and for all, galvanized by self-loathing for not tending to my own body. I was disgusted with all the habits of my past.

Ironically, Las Vegas is the only place you can smoke everywhere and anywhere you want. I had had enough and the clouds of smoke I was forced to walk through on my way to my room only reminded me of my own tacit and slowly self-destructive past. It was surprisingly easy to quit. I had quit once before, when Salman and I were first living together, because of his asthma. Then when he was not around I picked it up again. I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.

Dr. Seckin and I continued working diligently to set up the foundation after I completed filming the Las Vegas season. I was triumphant from quitting smoking and determined not to fall off the wagon again. Back in New York, my spirits lifted, I briefly saw both Adam and Teddy in the same week in June 2009. Overall, I felt a little like Wonder Woman. Invincible. It was a period of productivity and creativeness and also a newfound general optimism. I hadn’t felt like this for several years.

That same spring, buoyed by the energy of helping to launch the EFA and finding my voice, I also managed to somehow launch an entirely new venture: a fine jewelry collection at Bergdorf Goodman. I had been designing jewelry for personal use for years, and was itching to do it more professionally. Many years earlier, as a favor to a friend, I had agreed to meet a young jewelry designer named Tara Famiglietti. A willowy slip of a girl, with fine blonde hair hanging loose around her high, prominent cheekbones, Tara has the biggest, bluest eyes I have ever seen. While she is staggeringly beautiful, at the time she had a sadness in her expression that moved me deeply. When she first showed up at my door with some of her samples, she looked cool and casually chic in that way that girls in Paris and London do. Soon after that first meeting, we became fast friends. I very quickly learned that her father, with whom she had been quite close, had just passed. She was also having a bit of man trouble. Tara and I found it very easy to confide in each other. I have always had very
tight, long-lasting friendships with women, and often these women have been instrumental in my life. I sensed I could be that kind of friend for her at that time.

I began commissioning custom jewelry from Tara, starting with pieces for my wedding—modern interpretations of traditional Indian jewelry. I would also come to wear many of her delicate creations on the red carpet. Later, when I started filming the next season of
Top Chef,
I realized that many pieces in my own jewelry collection weren’t right for what I was doing on TV. I wanted to design a capsule collection for personal use that would better fit my new role as host. I didn’t much like what I was finding in my closet or in the shops. I wanted pieces that adorned the body, highlighted the nape of the neck or the small of the back, pieces that had movement and light but didn’t upstage me, make too much noise at Judges’ Table, or look inappropriate in the kitchen. I knew Tara was the only person to translate my vision.

My rapport with Tara is not only emotional or sisterly, it is also similar to the relationship many women in India have with trusted jewelers and artisans who come to the house to collaborate on family pieces. Whenever a member of our family had a jewel to be made or a stone to be set or reset (because someone had died and left the stone or there was an impending wedding and we needed to round out someone’s trousseau), we called our family jeweler, Mr. Mani, from Kerala Jewellers. He had a slight tremor in his hands, and dark chocolate skin the texture of time-worn leather. He wore his white hair back-combed and Brylcreemed, and was always dressed in plaid
lungis
(men’s sarongs). His magical toolbox fascinated me. Wooden with a complex hinge, it unfolded into a minidesk at which he sat on our veranda. His box was not unlike my grandparents’ Godrej, containing secrets and drawers I longed to pull open. I loved watching him work meticulously with all his tiny tools and files. He would first sketch a simple pencil drawing based on my grandmother’s descriptions of what she
wanted a given piece to look like. Mr. Mani worked quietly and methodically, never flinching as my grandmother insisted he had misinterpreted her extremely precise directions. Jewelry signifies so much more than self-adornment in Indian culture. The pieces serve as personal talismans, and the women in my family take the subject as seriously as they do their cooking or how they fold their saris. I loved Tara’s hand, and the way she interpreted and executed what was in my head so deftly. It felt like she had the same intuition Mr. Mani had had. The pieces Tara created for me to wear on
Top Chef
looked nothing like what she designed for her own line, but were something new and different; something immediately mine. We had an amazing shorthand between us, and often we finished each other’s sentences.

Frank Bruni of
The
New York Times
had spent several column inches in the paper dissing my sartorial choices when reviewing my first season on
Top Chef
. It had seemed unnecessarily cruel to me at the time and it still stung several seasons later. I am sure his slight was part of the impetus for my calling on Tara to design my accessories with me. It frustrated me that, as a woman, I had so much more attention focused on how I looked than, say, Tom, our head judge, did. But in hindsight, perhaps Bruni did me a favor. Whatever the origin, I
loved
making jewelry.

Bruni was not the first person to skewer me in the
Times,
though. No, Guy Trebay had that honor when he mused in the Style section on the reason for my appearances at the Bryant Park fashion shows, deriding me as a “brand-name goddess” and “semi-celebrated hustler,” and failing of course to mention what I had told him: that I was there for the same reason he was, to report on the clothes for
Harper’s Bazaar
in my style column. That article came out long before I started filming
Top Chef,
but it was from that point forward that I started to really struggle with developing a thick skin against media attention. Fortunately, as
Top Chef
progressed, most of the feedback from actual everyday viewers of the show was quite positive.
Plus, real professionals in the food world seemed increasingly to enjoy and appreciate the show.

Top Chef
both made me happy and taught me much, but I was itching to do something creative in addition to my TV work, to explore other facets of my interests. A few random people had seen the pieces I wore and asked where to find them. Slowly, I also had girlfriends and other TV personalities ask whether they could borrow them. With a bit of money left over from my Pantene contract, I designed a small collection of samples to add to what I already wore on the show, with Tara as my technical hands.

Now emboldened but largely ignorant of how to run a business, I somehow thought we could start a company, basically out of my kitchen sink. At the time, I had a spunky and sweet assistant named Shayna, who was a talented photographer and wonderfully creative. She shot the samples for our look book and other materials, and we called the company the Padma Collection. The three of us worked together elbow to elbow out of my tiny writing room, until I rented out the place on the sixth floor above my apartment as an office. It was getting pretty cramped in my writing room with all our raw materials, molds, and computers; Tara’s tools; and Shayna’s camera equipment. The upstairs apartment served not only as an office, but as a beautiful showroom, too, and the big open kitchen it had was perfect for testing recipes. The showroom was also a good meeting place for the foundation’s board, as up until then we’d been meeting in Seckin’s waiting room.

With all that was going on, I got it into my head that we should have the new office blessed, as I had done for every place I had ever lived,
except
my marital home. My ex-husband was a staunch fundamentalist atheist and had no patience for worshipping God in any form. I am pretty secular but didn’t mind hedging my bets. I called a couple of priests from my temple and they came in from Queens to bless our new space. They brought
fresh mango leaves, coconuts, and various idols and camphor to burn during the
puja.