Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  I thrilled at the playful trick. In such a beautiful restaurant, I felt the desire to fully experience it, to revel in every moment, every sight and sound. Now I was told that I could experience a small part of this beauty through the most intimate act: eating it. Teddy’s response was classic Teddy: “The best restaurant in the world and they’re serving me a flower? I have hydrangeas in my garden that look more delicious than this.” Not only was I asking him to eat a flower and a slug, but he was also paying through the nose for the pleasure.

  When the next course arrived, Teddy looked down at the ice-filled mason jar set in front of us. It held two shrimp, each one about the size of my pinkie. “Okay, Junior, what are we eating?” he asked. I told him what the waiter had told me: we were supposed to dip the shrimp in the emulsified brown butter provided, then pop them whole into our mouths. Oh, and did I mention the shrimp were still alive?

  “No way I’m eating mine,” he said, “he’s too cute,” disguising his disgust with empathy. I grabbed one. As I contemplated my task, it was complicated by the shrimp, which had started to move. Teddy picked up one of his, and soon it was moving, too. I had finally summoned the courage to eat mine when he decided that in their writhing, the two little guys resembled tennis players swinging tiny imaginary rackets. When he dubbed them Rafael and Roger, I put mine down for good.

  I couldn’t have had a better companion for this meal than Teddy—not despite his teasing, but because of it. Meals like this are part cooking, part performance art. They toe the line between the sublime and the absurd, between decadence and debauchery. On which side of that line they ultimately fall depends on the chef, but also on the diner. Teddy kept me grounded. He reminded me that while this was swoon-worthy food that bordered on art, it was still just food.

  Exaggerated derision figured prominently in our repartee. It was the way we coped with our differences. During the first hour of an afternoon spent watching golf, I’d groan, “How can you like this, Duke? It’s just men in funny pants walking.” Or I would gripe at the frequency with which he ate steak: “Well, I guess someone has to keep the cattle growers happy.” But even as he made fun of my love for dishes featuring chickweed and white currants and bleak roe, he indulged it. He took great pleasure in seeing me happy. Never had I been courted so thoughtfully, thoroughly, and with such imagination.

  To see Teddy at Basement Bhangra was to understand the extent of his devotion. Basement Bhangra is a once-a-month dance party at a club in Manhattan (back then it was at S.O.B.’s) that at the time drew hordes of Punjabi grad students and other subcontinentally inclined dancers who grooved to North Indian music fused with hip-hop. The effect was a sort of cross between a high school dance and a disco hoedown. This was my happy place. To Teddy, who preferred Fleetwood Mac and Mozart and despised dancing, it was a hellscape. But nonetheless he came. And in the sea of young brown sweaty bodies, Teddy stood out like, well, like a sixty-eight-year-old white guy.

  Because practically everyone in attendance at Basement Bhangra was Indian, I went resigned to being recognized. There were some stares and the occasional awkward conversation, each party straining to be heard above the bass. But the time I brought Teddy was different. People would approach me, and I’d prepare my cheery “Yes, I am Padma Lakshmi. Nice to meet you!” smile. “Is that who I think it is?” they’d ask, motioning toward my companion. “Is that really Teddy Forstmann?” These were MBA students, after all, far more interested in spotting the man who came out early against junk bonds than the woman best known for hosting a cable cooking show.

  The closer I felt to Teddy, the stronger my practical side pushed back. Part of this was deeply buried guilt. The age difference between me and Salman had, I believed, played a major part in the undoing of our marriage. I had told Salman this and I believed it was true. Being with Teddy made me feel like a hypocrite. I could not help thinking about how Salman would feel when he heard the gossip. I felt ashamed, and very mixed-up.

  For two years I told Teddy I didn’t want a relationship, that I wasn’t ready for one, and that even when I would be, I wasn’t sure he’d be the appropriate choice—even as we spent more and more time together and grew closer and closer. Whenever something good happened, Teddy was the first person I called. Whenever I needed advice about work or to vent or was scared, I called Teddy. We were thick as thieves and intermittently lovers, and I somehow convinced myself that if I kept telling him I couldn’t handle being in a committed relationship with him, I could keep us from getting too entangled romantically, yet preserve a friendship that was a main source of comfort and support at the time. But it was too late. We were already entangled. I just didn’t want to accept it.

  Part of me just wanted to play the field, honestly, as cruel as that is. For practically the first time in my adult life, I was single. Until that point, my romantic life had consisted of a series of serious, committed relationships, from my college boyfriend to Daniele to my husband. In the short time between my move back to the U.S. and the day I met Salman, I had briefly dated, but that was the extent of my life as a bachelorette. Now I had little desire to be anyone else’s wife or main squeeze. I had had enough of smiling silently at all the fancy dinners, all the events that blurred into one another in a daze of cocktail dresses, champagne, cultured small talk, and hurt feelings at the end of the night.

  All this “don’t tread on my freedom” stuff was just catnip to Teddy. There was nothing he liked more than a challenge, and after a lifetime of being chased by women who wanted to pin him down, my loner vibe appealed to him immensely. And Teddy loved the idea of coming to someone’s rescue. He had ample practice at it given his own personal history with his father, who suffered from alcoholism and other issues and often took out his frustrations on his mother. Teddy hated bullies and always rooted for the underdog. I had certainly filled his ears full of all my insecurities about making it without my husband and finding my own way. He could see I was scared, incredibly disillusioned about love, burned by bad experience, and wanting the world to go away. He would not go away.

  Somewhat early in our push-pull, “come closer, now go away” routine, I met a man named Adam Dell. It was November 19, 2007, and I was on a book tour for my second cookbook, doing a signing at the Strand. It was also the day I would find a listing for what would become my first home. I remember using the folded sheet from the Realtor as my bookmark. A mutual friend of ours brought Adam to the signing and afterward we all went out to a small dinner thrown for me by my friend Luca. Later that night we went dancing, and I liked how dainty I felt in contrast to Adam’s tall, broad-shouldered frame. I was with friends, letting loose after a horrendous year and a grueling book tour while at the tail end of a public divorce. It was therapeutic to dance and not talk. I felt liberated to a certain degree. He seemed to slip in easily among my friends and asked very little of me. There was a strong kinetic attraction between us. Nothing was verbalized or analyzed, but it was hanging in the air, daring me to do something about it. At that moment in time, just two months after my divorce, I didn’t trust my feelings about anything, and indeed was anxious not to feel anything, really, for anyone.

  Adam was about as different from Teddy, or Salman for that matter, as you can imagine. He was, for a start, my age. I hadn’t been with someone my age since college. Adam was fun, liked Led Zeppelin and spicy food, and felt to me like the prom date I never had. He ignited a certain playfulness in me. I didn’t know much about Adam, and I didn’t really investigate because I felt I had enough on my plate as it was. Over the course of my book tour we kept in touch via occasional text. I didn’t see him again until the following month in L.A., when I went to do an appearance on the Ellen show. Then I saw him once more a month after that, in mid-January, on his birthday. I had just returned from a New Year’s holiday with Teddy. To commemorate my new life as a divorcée, Teddy had charmingly rented a beautiful boat named the New Vida. I was looking forward to the year ahead, hopeful and expectant.

 
; So I kept seeing both men. My relationship with Adam illustrated to Teddy that I meant business about dating other people. But after a couple of weeks with Adam, I would miss Teddy terribly. I missed the verbal jousting, the wit, the all-consuming roller coaster that being with this charismatic man entailed. The whole thing was deeply unfair to Adam, because he never really stood a chance. No matter how easygoing and amenable he was to anything I threw his way, no matter how charming or thoughtful or fun, the fact was, my heart already belonged to Teddy, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

  I would spend the better part of 2008 feeling that while it was exciting to have two such different men court me, I probably wouldn’t wind up with either of them. I had very different experiences with each man. I rationalized that since I had been clear with both men about not wanting a serious relationship, and that I told them both I was dating other people, this made everything all right. That it was perfectly acceptable to date them both, even though I knew they both wanted more. I disregarded what I knew were serious feelings on both their parts. But beyond my own self-absorption, and my total lack of concern for whether I was hurting either Teddy or Adam, my feminist and willful side had kicked in. Why couldn’t I date more than one man? Men did it all the time without compunction. While I had a right to my own freedom, I did not look too far into the future to consider the consequences of my actions. The heart wants what it wants, and it hears only what it wants to hear. Neither of the relationships I was juggling felt as casual to these men as I was treating them. And if I had stopped to investigate my own heart honestly, I would have seen that while I was utterly taken with Teddy, or occupied with Adam, I still sorely missed Salman. I didn’t want to go back to my marriage, but the truth is that I wasn’t over my ex-husband. I was rudderless and should have made myself be alone.

  chapter 11

  That same desire to take ownership of and forge a new life for myself, on my terms, had also been driving me to find a home I could call my own—a home I owned, a place that belonged solely to me, that wasn’t contingent on a husband or a landlord. Freshly divorced, I had experienced a wound of displacement and homelessness moving into the Surrey that had just started to truly heal. I did not want to reopen it, ever. On a snowy day in January 2008, I unlocked the door to a home of my own, my first. The cute two-bedroom Alphabet City apartment on the fifth floor of an old brick tenement was a far cry from the Park Avenue townhouse I had spent the last few years in, but the place was all mine. I loved every inch of it.

  The neighborhood was a vast change from the historically landmarked street on which my marital home stood. At that time, Alphabet City still had a lot of rats scurrying around car tires in the night. The sidewalk outside my building often gave off the faint stench of stale urine and vomit splattered there by the nightly young bar hoppers. But I loved the neighborhood’s gothic weeping willows and scrappy communal gardens with their metal sculptures rusting under the heavy snow. And my little oasis was the quintessential image of what outsiders think a downtown New York apartment should look like. It had an open-plan kitchen with wooden cabinets I ripped the doors off and painted Moroccan red. The spare room had a load-bearing wall with two arches in the middle of it, but I made it work because I turned one half into my writing room and the other half into my dressing room. I made it as girly and feminine as humanly possible. My “ancient Egyptian” costumes from The Ten Commandments, along with various gowns and baubles I had been gifted over years of modeling, hung everywhere. It was wonderful just to have all my books and pictures back around me. Six months of being a gypsy and living in hotels and guest rooms had begun to wear me thin and jangle my nerves. I relished having my own space again, and the best part: I was finally in my own kitchen once more.

  The first thing I did was unpack the pots and pans and cooking utensils. I wasn’t really sure what to do with the half set of Tiffany’s wedding china. But I was so giddy about being able to cook in my own kitchen again that I lost any of the rancor I’d had about the inevitable division of goods that is part and parcel of a marital breakup. I thoroughly savored going to Kalustyan’s, my old standby gourmet ethnic store, and buying all my pantry ingredients. I lingered lovingly in their spice aisles like a bookworm in the stacks of an old library. I filled my basket with ras el hanout, baharat, urfa chili and sumac, green mango powder and zaatar, bottles of obscure hot sauces, yuzu and rose jam. I was in heaven. I went to Artisanal’s cheese cave and splurged on everything that Chantal, my crusty French cheesemonger with a gravelly voice and perpetually smudged cobalt-blue eyeliner, made me taste: small putty-like wheels of goat cheese soaked in eau-de-vie and wrapped in grape leaves; a fluorescent wedge of mimolette, cracked and pungent and briny; and an oozing, stinky round of Camembert. I spent endless hours perusing the shelves of Pearl River Mart, picking out all manner of bowls, from large to tiny, from which I slurped everything from noodles to pasta to ice cream. I went to Patel Brothers supermarket in Jackson Heights, loading up on white turmeric and green mangoes and tindora, a small Asian squash that is my favorite vegetable. I replaced the many jars of oily Indian pickles I had had to leave behind when I became a hotel vagabond. I was reunited with the sublime mouthfeel of cold salted yogurt and rice spiced with crunchy fried mustard seeds, a dollop of various beloved pickles nestled into each bite.

  I cannot remember the first complete meal I cooked in that kitchen in the East Village, although I know for a fact it must have contained a lot of aromatic sambar curry powder, because it was this taste, this remnant of home cooking, I longed for most in those last nomadic six months of misery. Teddy had been very generous with his living quarters. Upon coming home one afternoon and discovering me in his kitchen, he encouraged me to cook there whenever I wanted. He said no one other than his housekeeper had cooked him a midday meal in years, and the sight of me in an apron moved him almost as much as the indigestion he suffered later from the spicy lunch itself. After that I was careful not to pollute his tony Fifth Avenue penthouse with the odors of the subcontinent, even though his kids loved Indian food since they’d eaten it in South Africa.

  But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul. And cooking was indeed my salvation.

  I made the staple chutneys and condiments I used regularly, like thick, pasty cranberry chutney with cayenne and fenugreek. I boiled carcasses in a heap of vegetables and aromatics for stock I could freeze. I spent whole weekends in the dead of winter filling tall canisters with lentils and pulses of every color. I bought black rice, red rice, brown rice, and of course basmati rice by the heavy jute sackful. I replenished my cupboards with all those rare and funky things I had discovered over my years of travel: dried black Omani limes and Szechwan peppercorns, kokum fruit skins and tins of glittering pieces of orange glacé. Some friends tried to remind me I was living alone and surely would not need all this. But they didn’t get it. It comforted me to have all these twigs and leaves stuffed into my larder. On those new red shelves, I sought to replicate my grandmother’s storeroom. I never wanted to leave the house again.

  By my thirty-eighth birthday that September, I finally began to feel like I was getting my life fully back on track. I had settled into my new apartment. The show was doing really well. We had been nominated for an Emmy every single season since I had started, and though I in no way felt significantly responsible for this, it set me at ease about whether or not I truly belonged there. I had renegotiated a much better contract with the network, too, and I was beginning to take on other business ventures. I hadn’t felt comfortable or confident about money since the height of my modeling days. And back then it had troubled me that my material security was based on my looks, which I neither had earned nor could count on in perpetuity. Now I made
a living from my knowledge and skills and my efforts. I was self-reliant, and this feeling, this sense that I would indeed make it on my own, was crucial to restoring my faith in myself.

  Somewhere in the middle of all the back-and-forth between Top Chef and Teddy and Adam that year, I had started to worry that I wouldn’t get my act together in time to bear children. Despite my endometriosis, I hadn’t given up on becoming a mother. And I now had enough money in the bank to splurge on freezing my eggs, something Dr. Seckin also vehemently encouraged me to do. But in order to do so, I was required to first undergo a battery of (expensive) hormone tests.

  Seckin referred me to a fertility specialist, and as 2008 came to a close, I made the appointment. Early that winter, I dutifully took the tests. I was confident, or at least hopeful, while I awaited the results. When the fertility doctor called with my test results, I was making breakfast. I had just scrambled some eggs and delivered them to a crisp slice of sourdough, and drizzled the whole yummy thing with Tapatío Hot Sauce.

  I sat on my couch, the plate perched on my knees, as the doctor leveled with me. The stress of my disease had taken a toll on my body. My ovaries, he told me with a typical medical professional’s tact, were effectively even older than I was. Aging is hard enough on a superficial level. Your favorite features begin to wilt, like cilantro left out too long. The last thing you want to hear when you’re staring down the barrel of forty is the discourteous surprise that your insides are even older. Still worse, he told me that it was highly unlikely I could conceive naturally—“the old-fashioned way,” in his phrasing.