Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (30 page)

My grandmother emerged with a small
katori,
or bowl, with mashed-up lentils and rice from the kitchen. Her hand, wrinkled and worn, had mixed rice for every child of our family in this house for over thirty-five years. It was the same hand that had braided and oiled my hair, drawn countless marks of vermillion on my forehead, and had even landed hard on the side of my thigh when needed. This hand had shown Neela how to pleat her sari, and Bhanu the right way to burp Rajni and Rohit. It was the same hand that mixed batches of our secret house recipe for
sambar
curry powder twice a year, wielded the ladle of
dosa
batter when I first learned to make the fluffy thin crepes on the iron griddle, and administered Tiger Balm to KCK’s temples in the days when his head ached from the monsoon heat.

For a moment, I thought she might be the one to feed Krishna herself. I was keeping a low profile, doing as I was told. After handing me the bowl, she bent over, with agility, impossibly low, and applied a line of holy
vibhuti
ash across Krishna’s forehead as she lay writhing in annoyance. “
Ippo, nee punnu,
” Rajima said. “Now you do it.” Then I heard my mother’s voice, coming from a table where an open laptop was perched. She was tuning in via Skype and commanding me from Los Angeles. “Come on, Pads, the baby’s hungry!” I snapped to attention and placed a small espresso spoon of
kichidi
into the baby’s mouth. At first she coughed and sputtered but in mere seconds, she seemed to be mashing the pap with her tongue against the roof of her mouth like an old toothless man. Everyone in the room seemed to exhale at once. I heard the hearty belly laughs of the priests.

I thought then that for the first time in my life, in that house, these women were finally saying: “Okay, you’re up. It’s your turn.” For the first time, I did not feel like a minor, a junior, or a half pint. For the women in my family, I had finally made it to full adulthood, into their club, the big league. For a second I mourned not only the final extinguishing of my girl
hood, but the further separation, though ever so slight, between my body and Krishna’s.

The two things I remember about every important day or evening of my life are what I wore and what I ate. In fact, I can say with great conviction that food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

Since I can remember, people have asked me the same question: How do I eat so much and stay slim? The answer is simple: a lot of hard work. Much of the work is physical, some of it mental, all of it involving vast amounts of willpower and discipline I don’t always have. A good chunk is emotional and intuitive. One of the biggest moments in my life in food was a quiet one. An internal event, silent and profound, it happened about a month after childbirth, when I hadn’t lost any of the forty-five pounds I had gained. I had expected to bounce back, with moderate exercise and breast-feeding. But I hadn’t bounced back at all. In fact, I had gained six and a half pounds—the weight of my new baby—in the two weeks
after
giving birth. In that moment, I understood that the most important part of “getting my body back” was not going to be exercising, or the discipline to do it after I had been up all night and worked all day. It was not going to
be portion control or exerting the willpower it took not to reach for cookies or pizza. It was not even the time it would take to prepare healthy meals or count calories. Although I did do all of that, as much as I humanly could.

It was going to have to be the emotional work that got not only my body back, but also my confidence. I just decided that I wasn’t going to be upset if I didn’t lose the weight. I didn’t expect miracles and I was fine with being my new size. My baby was the miracle. My body had given me the greatest gift, one that I had been told I shouldn’t hope for. I was not going to feel bad about how I looked or expect to fulfill some vain image I had of myself. After a lifetime of being in front of the camera, I had to give up relying on my figure as a source of status, even if making my living still involved my physical appearance somewhat. So I became consciously pragmatic about the expectations I put on my body, on my self. I was truly, deeply okay with not losing the weight, in case that was what turned out to be my future.

It took a great amount of soul-searching and humility to come to terms with the fact that the good old days were gone and might not return again. That’s not to say I didn’t hope that all the other things I was doing would pay off. But I wasn’t like other models and colleagues who walked the runway in their skivvies eight days after giving birth. I didn’t appear on the cover of a weekly magazine after four or even six months, showing off a new postbaby “bikini body.” Dear reader, it took me an entire year, thirteen months actually, to work off the weight I had gained in pregnancy. And that was just fine.

There were simply other things that were way more important to me, chief among them spending time with my daughter. But also trying to make things up to Teddy, and in general just finding a sense of normalcy again by putting the turmoil of the last twenty months behind us. I admit it was very hard not to feel depressed, insecure, and inferior. Stripped of my old figure, I had to get used to the new me. For a woman who had led
my particular life, my body and its physical appearance were tied not only to my livelihood but to my womanhood and sense of worth. This is true for a lot of women, even those who don’t work in front of the camera. Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

I had had the experience of being betrayed by my own womanhood because of endometriosis and the resulting lifetime of chronic pain, but then my womb had miraculously come through when no one thought it could. This gave me a new perspective on my body. My body had created this beautiful baby and was now sustaining her. For the first time in my life I consciously placed less value on how I looked. It just wasn’t as important to me. I was profoundly thankful for what my body had produced.

In the span of just a few years, I had finally discovered what my condition was, struggled with the anger provoked by not having been diagnosed earlier, and then faced the sorrow of learning it was almost certain I couldn’t have children. Wondering what would happen to my career if I couldn’t lose the baby weight made me force myself to accept a reality I had not often considered. My looks were an asset I had consciously or unconsciously benefited from all my life.

When you have spent most of your adult life one way, and suddenly that changes, it’s hard not to freak the hell out. And it’s hard not to be distracted or worry about not meeting everyone’s expectations, as well as your own, about an issue that is very central to many women’s lives. So the only way I knew to not be distracted or disheartened by my weight gain was by making myself feel okay, good even, about my new size.

Making peace with myself about my body was the single most important thing I did to get my figure back. I just told myself that even if I did all the things I could to achieve my goals and I didn’t get the expected result,
I would not feel bad about myself. I refused to let the shape of my body get me down. And that released me from the yoke I think all of us suffer under, whether postpregnancy or not. It freed me of the tyranny of my own mind and my self-judgments, all of which were based on an objectified view of who I was.

It worked. I actually began to love my body and wore clothes to show off my extra pounds and roundness. And when I talk about curves, I mean a double-F
poitrine.
And when I speak of being bigger, I mean going from a size 4 to a size 14. It was then that people started saying again how good I looked. I hadn’t lost an ounce but I began to carry myself differently, move differently. I was really proud of my larger size, and enjoyed it. I began to feel womanly in a much earthier way. And I was much more brazenly confident than I had been when I had my usual slim figure. It was very weirdly exciting. I didn’t suck in my belly and I didn’t hide my size with clothing. I began to genuinely revel in my form. I threw away my newly bought postpregnancy Spanx (which I had hated with a passion all during filming the DC
Top Chef
promo shoot).

Because just as everybody is
not
meant to be a size 4, we all
are
meant to be different sizes at different times in our lives. We are meant to eat different things at different moments. Our needs shift as life shifts.

W
hen Krishna was just about a
year old, we went to film the
Top Chef
finale in the Bahamas. The whole crew was looking forward to getting away. It was still cold in New York City, where we were based. The winter had not yet given us any reprieve. We arrived at a huge, sprawling “family resort.” This was not some tucked-away little beach village but a mini-city of various high-rises built in a semicircle configuration with swimming pools below and lounge chairs galore, leading all the way down to the shore, complete with bar and food service, DJs and lifeguards, pool activities and cabana boys. The resort had all the charm of a large white cruise ship, groaning with people, that goes nowhere. Off in the distance behind the towers you could see a large hybrid water slide–roller coaster. There was also an extensive aquarium in the main lobby, and many shops and restaurants.

Luckily, we were put in the building of time-share apartments rather than in the thick of the hotel. I didn’t like the idea of Krishna eating hotel room service for so many days on end, so I made sure everywhere we stayed when traveling had a kitchen. I was looking forward to shooting,
to let the baby have some sunshine. Adam came down to be with her. She was still nursing. It was and had been an awkward year.

The baby always went to see Adam in his New York hotel room, accompanied by my mom and our nanny, as well as a bodyguard. I felt compelled to have a private security officer follow Krishna when she went to see her father that first year. I had become afraid: of the press following us, which they did; of Adam deciding to do something drastic in the moment; and of my mother and the nanny being put in a vulnerable position. I wanted the women to have some support in that environment.

Adam became to me a completely unknown entity. I could not believe this was the same man who had built me the swing and accompanied me to India. But I wasn’t going to make the mistake of misjudging things again, not when it came to my daughter or my mother. There wasn’t much communication between me and Adam at all, and what was there was extremely fraught. I still felt very intimidated and threatened by him because of the incident in the hospital.

To be fair, Adam had e-mailed me and left voice messages, too, apologizing for his atrocious behavior. But now that I had seen that side of him, it frightened me to the core. It was the same fear and dread I had felt growing up, when Peter raised his voice or lost his temper. I wanted nothing to do with that kind of person. And I was worried, to say the least, that the baby would regularly be around someone capable of that kind of anger. I hadn’t ever had a traditional relationship with Adam. We usually met for a date somewhere private, or hung out in a group with each other’s very close friends or family for a finite period of only a few weeks at a time. We were never a regular couple, exposed to the trials and tests that committed couples face. I had no insight on how he handled stress or reacted to adversity. During the time I had known him, prior to my getting pregnant, he had only done everything to please me, or to present himself as a mild-mannered and even-tempered person. Now I had no idea with whom I was
dealing, and Krishna and I were tied to him for the rest of our lives. We were all under strain, in a terrible pressure cooker of hurt feelings, fear, anger, and mutual resentment. I think the force of that pressure was too much for Adam, and he blew up. But some bells are hard to unring.

The effect of the blowup in the hospital would estrange Adam and me for the better part of the first four and a half years of Krishna’s life. And the worst of that time was about to begin.

It was in the gorgeous and sunny Bahamas, with white sand and pleasant beaches filled with happy families on vacation, that I got word that Adam and I were about to go to war.

We were filming a lunch and then Judges’ Table with several guest judges whom we had expressly flown in for the finale, like Morimoto and Michelle Bernstein, among others. The set was a glass-encased dining room in a building on one of the neighboring properties. The room was stifling, trapping the warm sun pouring in. I was sitting across from Wolfgang Puck. Suddenly, in the middle of asking for feedback from the other judges, I heard through my earpiece that we were stopping for a second. Then a producer stepped over to me on the set and quietly handed me her cell phone. She asked me to step away from the table. Because the next chef’s food was about to be served, we took a very short break. I went outside into sunlight so violently bright, I could barely keep my eyes open.

My publicist, Christina, was on the line. She informed me that the
New York Post
and the New York
Daily News
had both phoned her separately. Both tabloids had in their possession a copy of a court filing submitted by plaintiff Adam Dell against defendant Padma Lakshmi. They asked if I had any comment on the lawsuit. I had no idea any such legal action had been filed. Immediately I felt faint, despite the large meal I had just consumed on the set. Christina said the documents seemed authentic. I put her on hold and called my attorney, who not only had handled my divorce quietly and quickly years prior, but had also been dealing with Adam’s lawyer.
After Krishna’s birth, the attorneys had drafted an agreement pertaining to visitation for the first year of Krishna’s life that both Adam and I signed. Adam started agitating to negotiate a new one even before half the term of that first agreement had expired. The Dell lawyers had been threatening legal action for some time, repeatedly insinuating that I had far more to lose than Adam. I resented the implied threats to ruin my name and reputation, and thus my career, and they deepened my sense that Krishna’s father was not to be trusted.

It would be another twenty-four hours before my attorneys received our copy of the filing. The rest of my conversation with Christina and my attorney seemed to take place in a fugue state. It would be the only time in twelve seasons of
Top Chef
that I went missing from my chair at Judges’ Table. When I got back to my chair, Tom and Gail could see that the color in my face had drained. I had no choice but to continue with filming, but it was as if someone had turned down the volume on all of my senses. I couldn’t walk off the set fast enough.

I was required to provide Adam with a weekly written report detailing every milestone or development in Krishna’s life, including details about her diet and her daily activities. There were times I was, to be sure, way more descriptive than I needed to be. I liked writing about her, and tried to channel something born of strife into something positive: a journal of sorts Krishna could one day read of her early life.

June 18, 2010

KT spent this week in sunny California and had a ball. She was reunited with her grandmother and was very excited to see her again and listen to their personal made-up songs about fruit pies. She enjoyed hanging out at the pool but we were careful not to give her too much sun exposure as she is still too young even for sunblock. She has developed a light green ring around the pupils of her eyes so her baby blues may indeed be changing. Her eyebrows are also growing in and in spite
of her fair hair is starting to look strikingly more Asian. She grows ever more beautiful and willful. She is enjoying herself.

July 30, 2010

This week was very eventful and exciting for KT. She arrived at her ancestral home in Madras to uncommonly cool weather and a warm welcome by her auntie Neela and her great-grandmother Jima. She had a couple of days of being cuddled and doted on and then went to Mumbai for two nights at the presidential suite at the Oberoi hotel where her mom had a photo shoot and every member of the staff promptly fell in love with her. She also experienced her first monsoon and had a lovely view of the Arabian Sea as torrential rains filtered the sunset over the bay outside her window. It was a very spooky and beautiful welcome and one that she took much glee in. She especially enjoyed her large bathtub but was overjoyed to return to her newly discovered bucket bath at her great-grandma’s place. She also managed to turn on her side all by herself and then actually turn back. She pushes off her aunties’ hands and inches forward to what looks like a mini crawling motion. She then gets tired and turns over. She also had her first taste of carrot, which she seemed to enjoy but then needed to be topped off by her mother’s milk anyway. One has the sense that Krishna is very at home here. She is fascinated by her own face, as it now often sports a tiny jeweled bindi on her forehead. In fact, it gives her great pleasure to look at herself in the mirror and she is wondering why her mother insists on wrapping herself with this new type of dress but notes that the sari gives a greater sense of privacy and ease for breast-feeding. She has her own portable tent at all times.

December 12, 2010

Krishna is growing long and lovely. She is 29.5 inches and weighs 18.5 pounds. She is now able to stand by herself for 2 to 3 seconds before collapsing back down on her bum. She also learned how to clap her hands this week and give her loved ones a high five by slapping their hand. While she has an immense treasure trove of toys,
she prefers to play with her mother’s silver coasters by knocking them off the coffee table and letting them clatter onto the floor, flinging them hither and yon. She loves lentils and rice with kale and cumin as well as mashed potatoes but has no palate for avocados whatsoever. She is pooping copious amounts.

June 3, 2011

Krishna had a happy week. She is starting to remember passages to familiar songs she sings with various loved ones like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Lula-lu.” She is also having a growth spurt and at times it seems she wakes up in the morning visibly bigger in size than when she went to bed just hours before. She also knows how to smile on cue for the camera and juts her face forward chin first. She has obtained possession of a much-coveted sable hair makeup brush and uses it to paint the cheeks of faces in her beloved magazines. She also rubs it across the back of her hand, enjoying the soft feathery bristles against her skin. The only blip was that she bumped her face quite hard into the wooden part of the bed at the beginning of this week and has a little bruise not only on her forehead but on her cheek as well. Those in her household are encouraging her to walk slowly rather than run but it seems our girl knows only one speed: full steam ahead.

I thought that by giving all this detail to Adam, especially since we were not speaking, I could show him that she was well cared for, and that Teddy and I were giving her a loving family life, even if it was not the traditional one he perhaps envisioned. But all this information only enraged him. He must have felt very left out. And so all his anger was harnessed in the contents of the court filing.

When I got to my hotel room, I was in shock. I couldn’t believe Adam was suing me for full custody of our child. I couldn’t imagine why he thought this was a good idea. My nanny, who had spent the afternoon with Adam and Krishna, knew about the lawsuit even before I did. Adam had had the “courtesy” to break the news to her just before he sent the
two of them back to me. She was horrified and came home worried that I would be wrecked, unable to finish the shoot in the Bahamas. Luckily, by that time I had been hosting the show for quite a few seasons. I knew how to tune things out, or at least ignore my thoughts until I had time to fully process them. I just needed to get through the rest of the shoot, crown the next Top Chef
,
and go home. What made the experience particularly excruciating was that Adam was staying in the same hotel that we were. Over the next few days, some of the crew and executives actually bumped into him on the beach. He said cheerful hellos to them like nothing had happened, which made my colleagues deeply uncomfortable.

I called Teddy as soon as I reached my room and had fed Krishna. She was for some reason ravenous and wouldn’t let go or stop suckling for a very long time. I did not want her near me when I spoke to Teddy, because I needed to vent out all my rage and sheer incredulousness at the stupidity of a public lawsuit. Who could be foolish and thoughtless enough to give the tabloids a court filing that contained the Social Security number of our child? Who could be such an idiot? And what father would think that this type of stress on the mother wouldn’t bleed and affect a nursing infant?

When I phoned Teddy, he immediately said, “I know all about it, Junior.” Jim Gallagher (the head of communications at IMG) had received a call from a friend of his at the Associated Press, who had a copy of the whole court filing on his desk already. It had been almost a year since Krishna was born, and more than that since we found out I was pregnant. In all that time, once I had made my decision to include Adam, Teddy had never once said, “I told you so.” But now he really didn’t know what else to say. He came down that weekend to give me moral support and even brought my assistant, Tucker, along on the plane for good measure. That Friday, when he arrived sometime in the early evening, I could only collapse into his arms and weep. “I tried to tell you . . .” He trailed off.

Teddy told me that of course he would try to be there for me as much
as he could, but he really couldn’t help things that much. “When I was in a position to help, Junior, you didn’t take my advice.” He said he knew my heart was in the right place, and that I was trying to do what was best for Krishna. “What you experienced with your old ex-husband is a picnic compared with what you’re in for now. Just prepare yourself. Things are going to get very ugly, and I can’t save you from this. You’ve got to face the storm. This is what you get for inviting this person into your bed, and into our lives.”

It was very difficult to hear this, but Teddy was not a bullshitter. He would not soften the blow, because that would not have done me any good. We slept with the baby between us that night, hugging each other over her body. I felt like the world was about to crash over my head in the morning. I did not want the night to end.