Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (6 page)

When I was finally well enough to leave the house, I went to see a divorce lawyer. It was not an easy trip, and not just because of the pain biting at my belly. To seek a divorce was to admit failure. It was to accept that the doubts my friends and family expressed early on—he had already been married three times; how would a relationship between two people of such unequal stature in age and accomplishment be equal or work out—were warranted. It was to confront the possibility that when we parted ways, I might disappear back into the relative obscurity from which I came. It was to tear my life in two, to leave the side of the man I had loved the most. Yet as always, my mother’s story and will gave me hope. My mother, Vijaya (her name means “victory” in Sanskrit), had survived much worse. When my husband returned from his Christmas holiday in London, in January 2007, only to jet off again a few days later to the Jaipur Literature Festival,
I told him I wanted a temporary separation. “Well,” he said, “you can have one, but it won’t be temporary.” I told him I had seen a lawyer, and he replied, “Then there’s nothing to discuss.”

By that April, I had recovered from my surgery, finished my cookbook, and flown to Miami to film the third season of
Top Chef.
Salman and I had reconciled a month back, provisionally. I thought then that ours was the greatest love story of my life and I couldn’t bear to end it. We had agreed to work on our relationship. Three weeks into filming, my husband would fly down to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. I looked forward to it. But first I had work to do.

We had just finished a segment when I got word he had arrived and was waiting for me in the control room. “Thanks,” I said. “Can you tell him I’m not done working, so I can just have a quick cigarette?” I forgot I was still wearing my mic. Salman could clearly hear me on the monitors. I had quit smoking when we first moved in together. I’d failed many times before. But he suffered from asthma and somehow it was easier to stop smoking for his health rather than for my own. As our marriage had started its painful undoing, I had resumed the insidious habit, keeping it a secret from him. I didn’t want to add my smoking to the growing list of ways I disappointed him. After a long day of shooting and in the midst of another painful period, I needed a minute to myself, and some noxious relief.

I had both revealed my relapse and embarrassed him in front of my colleagues after he’d flown in from New York especially to see me. That night, when work wrapped, we fought. The row was exactly the same as the one we’d had a year earlier, after our anniversary dinner at Bouley, and just hours before I’d been carted away by an ambulance. It was the same one we’d had so many times before, the same one that had once caused him to lash out, calling me “a bad investment” during another fight in London on New Year’s Eve in front of a friend. He wanted what I couldn’t
give him. I didn’t feel like being intimate, and his constant irascibility because of that fact made me want to be even less so. This time, my empathy had waned, my guilty feelings about not performing my wifely duty outmatched by outrage. After all I’d been through medically. After all he’d seen. Nothing had changed. I fought feelings of failure, as a woman and as a wife. Still, I knew right then I had to leave.

I wasn’t sure how we’d make the split public—an odd decision we had to consider. I was prepared to say that we parted amicably. He never gave me the privilege of deciding. “Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage,” read the statement released by his literary agent. How businesslike. I was still in bed recovering from a subsequent endometriosis procedure at the end of June when a friend who had read the paper called to make sure I was okay. I had no idea any announcement had even been made. And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

I
’
d moved into the Sorry Hotel
over July Fourth weekend, while Salman was in London to visit his son Milan. I wanted to get out before they returned to New York. Sweet, little Milan, what would he think? Just a few years back I had taught him to roller-skate from our stoop so he could savor the city as I had when I was younger. I hated the thought of his breathing in the toxic atmosphere of loss and anger that then existed between Salman and me in our home. I wanted to talk to my stepson, to tell his that I still loved him, and that my leaving his father was not intended as a rejection of him; that I would still be there, if and whenever he wanted me, if his parents allowed it. I didn’t get the chance. When I asked if I could speak to him, I was told by Salman that when he informed Milan, “She is leaving us,” Milan had said, “Then I don’t want to see her.”
Us?
Who could blame a boy for siding with his father?

Days before I left, Dr. Seckin had performed yet another surgery, this one to excise the remaining endometrial tissue that he wasn’t able to remove during the first. I was gaunt. A cocktail of sadness and medication made me nauseous and sapped my appetite. The stale smell of picked-at sandwiches and barely touched haystacks of French fries lingering on
room service trays didn’t help. I had been at the hotel for over a month by this time. Gavin Kaysen, the chef at Café Boulud, had been instructed by Daniel Boulud to look after me, and they often sent up trays filled with every single dessert on the menu. It was a gallant and kind gesture but did not restore my appetite.

I knew the trick to eating well was to cook for myself, and to that end I had selected this hotel room for its kitchenette. But I couldn’t bear to turn on the stove. As thin as I was, I felt heavy and sluggish. I was paralyzed by sadness and self-doubt. Had I made a mistake getting married in the first place? Or had I given up too quickly? I had left a familiar unhappiness for a new, uncertain sort. I winced as I recalled my failings as a wife and I imagined confronting the people whose smiling faces populated our wedding photos. I tried to envision a future without the companion with whom I had spent half of my adulthood, my hope for a happy life eroding with each memory of my beloved.

Back on the floor, staring at those spilled kumquats scattered on the carpeting among the detritus of my life, I felt so inconceivably far from the days of intercontinental phone calls that reached into the night. I had left because I couldn’t stay. There had been no shortage of love, no infidelity. It was a simple lack of empathy on both our parts. Racked by our own wounds and emotional fatigue, we could not soothe each other. And down we went, spiraling apart. I felt totally lost, out to sea, waiting for my thirty-seventh birthday, childless and now alone.

I had to do something to cut through the grayness around me, and the grayness inside. I picked up one of the kumquats and pressed my nail into its rind, releasing an aroma so faint I thought I’d imagined it. As a girl in Los Angeles, I made a game of stomping and squishing fallen kumquats as I walked to school. The kids on our block used to dare one another to eat them whole, plucked off the tree. Once in a while, one of us would take the dare, chomping down on the whole fruit, the sweet rind giving way to an
explosion of bracingly sour pulp and the bitterness of broken seeds. Now, here in the hotel room, I licked the citric juice as it stung a torn cuticle. I could taste the sunshine and dirt of my mother’s garden. I ached to be in her arms now, to bury myself in the cocoa-butter creaminess of her soft breasts. Whenever I despaired, I thought of my mother and my grandmother, both of whom had had lives much harder than mine.

My mother, Vijaya, was thirteen when her mother died. She spent the next six years shuttling among family members until she went to college. There she had a boyfriend, whose hand she would hold in secret when they thought no one was looking. But marriage for her, as it was for so many girls in that era, was to be arranged. Her father put an ad in the newspaper that joined countless other pithy summaries, just as they fill websites and the pages of
The
Times of India
today. These were essentially matrimonial classifieds, with all the efficiency of a Craigslist posting for an old bookcase. My mom’s went something like: “Groom wanted. Fair, lovely, college-educated (BSC), 25, 5´4˝, Tamil Brahmin Iyer girl seeks alliance with boy of similar and suitable background,” plus her horoscope. Grooms to be were advertised with the same specs: complexion, education, age, height, background, caste, and sect. Desperation occasionally shone through these mundane details. In that era, if you spotted the phrase “caste no bar” (essentially meaning that any caste would do), then you knew the prospective bride or groom had baggage. A widow with children, say, couldn’t limit herself to the higher castes.

A number of men showed up at the casting calls my grandparents held to inspect possible choices from ads that looked promising. My mother favored a tall, fair, handsome man who showed no fear in the face of her father. Quite the contrary: his cavalier manner included announcing that he belonged to an exclusive private club and peppering the conversation with a smattering of English swearwords she had never heard spoken aloud. To my grandfather, this man was insolent. To my mother, he was a rebel, the swag
gering opposite of her secret college boyfriend who was too scared to hold her hand in public. Needless to say, my grandfather did not approve. She won the fight, but my grandfather was right in the end. A year later, they were married and on the day of the wedding, she saw him in the bathroom with his female cousin. At the time, she did nothing.
Once we’re married and fall in love,
she thought,
he’ll forget about her.
My mother was a nurse, well versed in the bodily aspects of the birds and the bees, but naïve about love.

Less than a year later, when she found out she was pregnant, her husband dragged her to the doctor, who refused to perform an abortion on a woman so clearly there under duress. I wince now when I think about how I almost wasn’t. Twenty-five years later, when I first met my biological father, I asked him to explain himself. He regretted it, he said, but at the time he didn’t want to bring a child into such a troubled marriage. Only after my own marriage revealed itself to be doomed did I understand his inclination, if not his actions.

During my mother’s pregnancy, they moved into an apartment just a couple of floors above the kissing cousin. He’d often leave my mother home alone, slinking in many hours after work ended and lying about where he’d been. One night, his friend Krishnan dropped by while he was out. Disturbed by the sight of a very pregnant woman left home alone, Krishnan stayed with her for hours. He was gone when my father finally stumbled home. She confronted him. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I told you, I was with Krishnan,” he said.

I was born in Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi. My mother endured thirty-six excruciating hours of labor unmitigated by an epidural. She gave birth in a hospital bed, not at home as my grandmother had, but otherwise it was as natural as could be. I learned of her long labor from an aunt only a few years ago. Throughout our many rows, my mother never wielded it as a rhetorical weapon. All she ever said was, “Once I saw you,
kanna,
it didn’t hurt at all.”

My parents were fighting constantly by the time I turned one. My grandfather came to the house to help resolve their disputes. Divorce was anathema to conservative Indian culture then. It barely existed in the cultural vocabulary, religious or otherwise. Most couples stuck out marriage, through thick and thin, infidelity and abuse. Yet when he heard my father spit, “Your daughter is ready to lick my boots,” my grandfather sided with his daughter over tradition and took her and me back to Delhi. They divorced a year after. But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them.

Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement,
Roe v. Wade,
and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.

So, when I was two, my mother left India for America. She couldn’t afford to bring me with her. She couldn’t care for a young daughter while she studied for her local nursing license and worked in a hospital. She would spend the next two years diligently working in quiet agony, preparing a life for me. Tha-Tha and his second wife, my grandmother Rajima, raised me back home. While my mother prepared a life for us in New York, my grandfather tutored me for that life back in New Delhi. For those two years, I would effectively see neither of my parents.

My grandmother tells me that long after the other kids had stopped playing and gone inside, I’d sit by the fence that enclosed our building’s courtyard in New Delhi. She would call me in and I’d shake my head. When asked what I was waiting for, I’d say, “I’m waiting for my mom to come home from office in America
,
” pronouncing the last word “Ahm-ree’-KAI.” In Tamil, my native language, you add the suffix “
kai
” to a plant to refer to its vegetable. I didn’t know America from bitter gourd. I certainly didn’t know it was a place across an ocean. I waited with my grandparents while my mother worked to make a better life for us. She sent for me when I was four.

I finally rejoined my mother on Halloween night in 1974, exactly two years to the day after she herself had first deplaned at JFK. She picked me up at the airport wearing a poncho that she’d knitted. She had a blanket draped over her arm, because she feared I would suffer in the New York cold.

On the way home in a cab, we passed many children in costume—witches and clowns and Batmen. I thought they were beggars, like the urchins on the streets in Delhi who would dress up and perform for rupees. But there were so many! We reached my mother’s apartment, at 405 East Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan. Inside near the door I noticed a bowl of candy, which I assumed was for me. But the doorbell kept ringing and my mother kept handing over
my
candy to these costumed kids! I was horrified until she explained the holiday.
Ahm-ree’-KAI,
I thought,
a magical place where kids get candy just for dressing up!

She gave me a very short tour of her one-bedroom apartment, which was much smaller than my grandparents’ home in Delhi. Of course, that didn’t matter to me. My mother’s presence more than made up for the lack of space. We lay together in her queen-size bed, under brightly colored covers, and I fell asleep excited—about candy and clowns, about our new life together. She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.

My new life brought many changes—a new city, and my mother’s new boyfriend—but none as jarring as suddenly being deposited in the land of omnivores. My family members, Brahmins all of them, were strict vegetarians. In India, a large vegetarian population meant loads of options at the restaurants and street stalls. When I arrived in the States, I wouldn’t even consider eating meat, despite my mother’s pleading. It was the seventies and meat was considered healthy. She also wanted her daughter to explore and enjoy the city and its food along with her. The food at these restaurants was either too meaty or too strange for me at the time, and early on it was a struggle to feed me. Of course, she and her boyfriend, a Punjabi cab driver from Queens, couldn’t afford to go out
and
pay for a sitter, so I went out with them, too. (Dragging a kid along, even well past her bedtime on a weeknight, is squarely within seventies Indian tradition, which claims, disingenuously or not, that routine is not nearly as important as familial togetherness.)

My mom did make sure that her culinary wanderlust took us exclusively to restaurants that had rice, virtually the only thing I’d eat. And so I became New York’s most practiced rice aficionado. At Mañana’s on First Avenue, my mom ate tacos as I focused on a heap of red-hued grains and beans. At the Japanese place near the Russian Tea Room, where customers sipped soups from small bowls cupped in their hands, I ate rice doused with soy sauce and Tabasco. I liked sitting on the floor and watching all the men struggle to remove their chunky-heeled boots and sit comfortably with their dates.
In India, we always sat on the floor at home and took off our shoes before entering the house, so I was perfectly at ease there. At a long-gone Armenian place in the East Forties, I ate pilaf and cucumbers. And whatever I ate, I shoveled into my mouth with my right hand, just as I’d learned to do in India. Except for the occasional flat wood spoon that came with ice cream cups, I had never really used or even been presented with silverware before I got to America. Spoons and forks took me a while to get the hang of.