Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  All those hours and days and weeks staring at that ceiling, looking back, revealed a new perspective on my years with Salman. Early on, we were so full of passion. Even when we fought, which we did quite a lot over matters both large and very small, I took it as evidence of the intensity of our love. He would slam doors and storm out, snatching a pillow from our bed and dramatically decamping to another room. He’s said his piece, I’d think. He’ll cool off by morning. Then I’d hear his fast footsteps on our creaky wood floor and he’d charge back in, like a rhinoceros up on its hind legs. I found these heated exchanges challenging and difficult. I had heard enough bad-tempered yelling from my stepdad in high school to last me a lifetime. I no longer wanted that as a part of my life. Nor did it help that my husband argued with the same lethal eloquence he had used to woo me. Of course, just because a point is well made, doesn’t mean it’s right. I was articulate enough but couldn’t compete rhetorically. After a while, I was simply defiant.

  Passion can come from many places, including but not limited to love. I don’t doubt he loved me. Nor do I doubt that what seemed like a desire for me was also in part a desire for what I provided—an adoring audience. Few people could resist his charm, the way he dominated a dinner party and made you glad you were there to listen. This made him a glorious friend and party companion. But after a party, everyone goes home. Me, I went home with him. I was the full-time, live-in audience.

  As is the case with many creative people, his ego needed frequent tending. He is, without a doubt, a brilliant man and a great artist, yet somehow he lacked self-awareness and, tellingly, a sense of humor about himself. Every October, when the Nobel Prize winners were announced, he became moody and irritable. He was certain he was nobélisable, and every year I’d comfort him, cooing, “Of course you deserve it” and “Oh, they don’t know what they’re doing.” I did feel he deserved it and the disappointment understandably cut him deeply. But then he’d say, “Yes, many great artists never get the Nobel,” continuing on to list, without irony, those writers: “Proust, Joyce . . .”

  My attention was proof of my devotion and my devotion was a balm for his insecurities. At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth. I thought marriage might prove to him that I wasn’t going anywhere.

  To be fair, my husband didn’t change during the eight years we were together. I knew what I was getting into. I think, however, that I changed, as do most women between twenty-eight and thirty-six. And because I’d been a model, enjoying six or so years of surreal, carefree existence, my twenties had been a sort of extended adolescence. When we met, he was already the man he’d always be. At twenty-eight, I was still becoming myself. Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending. The tension grew worse as my work prospects grew brighter and I became, I guess, less portable. No longer could I be on his arm at every dinner and tribute. I had a second cookbook coming out, was hosting Top Chef, and had addressed the UN in support of the organization then called UNIFEM that advocated for women. Those achievements were my own. And I was proud of them.

  All that time in bed and the locus of my sickness brought another matter into focus. I had never really decided whether I wanted children. Early on, Salman told me he didn’t want to have another child. After all, he had two already. This made me wonder whether our relationship had legs. Ultimately, though, he relented. For me, he’d be open to it, and so I felt comfortable agreeing when one day we rolled out of bed after almost five years together and he wondered aloud, “Maybe we should get married.”

  “Are you asking me to marry you?” I asked.

  “Yes, will you marry me?” he said.

  Our honeymoon included a red carpet event in Cannes (my first) to help out his son Zafar, who was doing PR there, and a stop in Barcelona so he could give a speech. I was immune then to what this rather unromantic detour portended. And I didn’t mind so much. I’d have said so if I did. What mattered was that we were together. As we walked the carpet, I watched the mass of photographers falling over one another as flashes flashed and shutters clicked with a constancy that produced a sound like an infestation of some strange insect trying to attract mates. I was no naïf at the time, no stranger to the spotlight or the paparazzi. I had paraded down the runaway in a bikini. I had cohosted a live TV show. Yet for some reason now, with cameras going off like automatic weapons, my worried thoughts—why are they taking so many photos, like nature photographers trying to catch a hummingbird in flight, when we’re standing still?—became a physical presence. I couldn’t breathe. Salman sensed something was wrong and I found comfort in his hand steady around my waist. For the next few years, until we divorced, I had panic attacks on the red carpet. In these moments I was captured being what I most feared I would become: an ornament or medal. I was not a model, host, actress, or advocate. I was wearing a sparkly dress and standing beside a great writer. I was worried, whether I knew it then or not, that without him I would simply disappear.

  My laissez-faire attitude about motherhood began to change. The surgery brought a sense of urgency to my decision. If I did want kids, I would have to find out right away whether my body would even oblige. I’d also have to be sure I wanted to bring a child into this marriage. My husband was fifty-nine then. Aside from the logistical complexities of our relationship—he traveled often; his children lived in London; with which family would he spend holidays if I couldn’t travel, as had been the case while I was bedridden?—there was my unhappiness. I was a child of divorce (two times over). I dreaded my child having the same experience. Before the operation, we had somehow managed to piece and patch together the relationship with the putty of our love. But now, I could no longer continue making those repairs. Even after the surgery and all of Dr. Seckin’s talking to him, Salman didn’t seem to grasp the disease’s impact, on me or on our marriage. He was absent, emotionally and often physically. The women in my family shepherded me through recovery and made sure I was never alone.

  I was left to grapple, however, with the most intimate effects, those that only a partner can know, by myself. I felt hollow, both in spirit and in body, my insides having been scalded, carved, and scraped out. I had been feeling guilty, like a bad wife, for not wanting to make love. It was this issue that was the nucleus of much of the strife between my husband and me. It must have been hard for him, after experiencing the intensity of my passion for him for all those years, to be confronted with my ebbing desire, my diminished wellness of being, and the increased distraction of my work.

  But now the doctor had informed us that there was a tangible medical reason for my waning libido. It wasn’t my fault. And it did not have anything to do with my love for him. Lying there bedridden, I felt that my sexuality was even more eroded than before the operation. I looked outside our window at the bare-limbed tree in the neighbor’s backyard, stoic in northern light. I swam in an ocean of loneliness as I thought about my marriage and my future. I was drowning.

  That loneliness then turned into anger. What about “in sickness and in health”? What about “I’m so sorry I gave you such grief when you were very ill”? What about “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you on our anniversary, when the ambulance had to take you away”? Now, in retrospect, I can see how my husband suffered. The difference between two people who love each other as romantic partners and every other loving relationship is the sexual aspect of that union. At that time, I had just received the information that my fertility was in peril, I had been feeling like I had let down my husband for over a year (my body had failed me, but it had also failed him), and we were arguing almost every time I chose to pursue my own work instead of accompany him for his.

  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.

  chapter 3

  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 swaggering 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.