Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  Meanwhile, heat the oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the cumin seeds. After a minute, when the cumin starts to sizzle, add the shallots and ginger. Stir. When the shallots become glassy, after about 4 to 5 minutes, add the bell pepper and the carrots and stir to sauté. Add ½ teaspoon salt and the curry powder. Stir, cooking for 3 to 5 minutes more, until the vegetables are done but still al dente. Remove from heat and cover to keep warm. Once the lentil-and-rice mixture is ready, add the sautéed vegetables. Stir together. Remove from heat.

  Now add the spinach and cilantro, stirring well. Adjust salt to taste. In a separate pan, melt the butter. Add the black peppercorns and cook over low heat just until fragrant and slightly browned. Once the butter is golden brown, add the curry leaves. Fry for 30 seconds or less.

  Drizzle the butter mixture on top of the kichidi and serve warm. It should have a porridge-like consistency.

  But I knew that this recipe was not my grandmother’s pongal. I knew I could not suggest anything other than what they prescribed for Krishna’s special day. “Oh, of course, it’s very important what her first food is,” I said, feigning innocence. A deep, long silence on the phone from Neela seemed to be screaming: ARE YOU CRAZY? “Just get here and we will handle the rest.”

  While we did observe most major holidays, our family in India was for the most part pretty secular. So I didn’t know what the sudden fire drill was about. I had really no recollection of what annaprasanam was, to be frank. Simply put, it is the ritual to commemorate the baby’s budding relationship to food, to bless a child with lifelong good dietary habits and much bounty in her life. It marks the transition from mother’s milk to real food; from liquid to solids. This was my kind of ceremony. How could I have missed it? Who doesn’t like a celebration of food? Well, I was young when it happened to me, and just eight when it happened to Rohit, the last of the births in our generation that I was there for. So I could be forgiven for not remembering.

  But I did know enough to sense that what had recently happened at a Singaporean strip mall while we were shooting was not, well . . . kosher. Every location we shot Top Chef in had some “must-try” down-and-dirty local joint for tacos or dumplings or barbeque. Wherever the place, all of us made a mental list of the things we needed to try and often passed that info around the set through word of mouth and call sheets, memos, and texts. Part of the fun of a traveling food show is getting to try all these interesting, off-the-wall edibles in situ. Singapore was a cornucopia of pan-Asian food, from fresh live frogs fried to order with salt and white pepper sauce at the No Signboard restaurant, to hawkers who sold sizzling satay off their street carts at nighttime. Our crew took pleasure in sampling it all. I was no different, and prided myself on being quite a culinary spelunker.

  Traveling to distant lands and consuming whatever local delicacies they offered was my preferred way of life. My modeling career, and even before that, crisscrossing the world to go between my mom’s home in the U.S. and my grandmother’s home in India, had afforded me many opportunities along the way to sample the food in other countries. In fact, I had been to Singapore alone several times on my way to Madras before the age of eighteen. So when the camera guys told us about the dumpling house in the food court just half a mile from our hotel, my assistant, Jason, Michelle, and I had to go. One afternoon after a Quickfire shoot had finished, I nursed the baby and attached her to my chest in the Baby Bjorn. And off we went to the mall. We ordered exactly what we were told was the specialty: various dumplings in a beef broth soup. The restaurant was more fast-food dive in the middle of a bustling food court at the tail end of the lunch hour than proper establishment, and looked like an old repurposed Panda Express, with neon lighting and plastic laminated white and light-blue Formica tables. I grew up reading Calvin Trillin and all his food adventures. I was also used to eating in all kinds of places, so this did not faze me in the least and I brought Krishna along. We waited patiently, Krishna dangling from my torso, cooing and jiving to the crowds of people and sights around her.

  Once the bowls of steaming soup came, I gently ladled a sip onto a big ceramic Chinese spoon, careful to graze off any hot, scalding drops of broth that may have been hanging from the bottom to protect Krishna’s head. I held the spoon absentmindedly in front of me—but of course in front of the baby, too. As I listened to whatever joke Jason was making, waiting for my broth to cool, Krishna leaned in and began to slurp what was on the spoon. I could see her head crane and turn sideways as I guided the spoon up and over her head toward my waiting mouth for every subsequent bite. We all thought this was funny. “No, no, no, this isn’t for you! You haven’t even had cow’s milk yet, never mind cow meat or broth!” We Hindus believe that the first thing you feed a child is incredibly important. Traditionally, Brahmin Hindus do not eat any meat or eggs. I never thought this would be how Krishna would eat, growing up in the West. But I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. You are giving her the soup from the carcass of a cow, our most sacred animal. There were so many customs and observances of my upbringing that I had been unable to fulfill, but this one, however, I was totally aware of from a very early age. I had a plan in mind for Krishna’s diet, a precise one. Vegetables and grains slowly introduced one by one, in succession, after she turned six months old. No animal products whatsoever until after age one, and then only dairy, and then eggs, but only after eighteen months. Then fish and seafood after age two, and chicken at two and a half, then red meat after that but only if she took a liking to it.

  Murky beef broth with floating bits of mystery meat was not what I had in mind as her first foray into real food! I felt horrible that literally under my nose, in that moment, I had undone the best-laid plans of a cornerstone of my duties as her mother. Not to mention that I had effectively denied my heritage and disregarded the practices of my own religion. I prided myself on how well one could eat following a Hindu Brahmin lacto-vegetarian diet. I had extolled its virtues on many occasions and truly believed in its merits. I knew that what had happened, while an accident, was also karmic retribution for all the bodies of animals I had consumed in my life and career in food. I felt a horrible knot in my stomach that was half guilt and half dread, bound together with a glue of feeling like a fool for not understanding that of course Krishna would be tempted. Whose daughter was she, anyway?

  Michelle tried to put a positive spin on the first-food fiasco. “Well, at least she is willing to try new things!” “Just pretend it didn’t happen,” Jason countered. “You can’t blame a little baby, and you only looked away for a second.” I knew I would roast in some far-off Hindu hell for not adhering to the easiest of rules of my faith’s culinary tenets. But then, shortly after, curiosity overtook guilt and any sense of duty. I wanted to see if it was a fluke or not, so I did the unthinkable, the blasphemous. I gave her a second spoonful. “Okay, now you’re asking for it; I am looking the other way because I don’t want to lie to your mom when she asks me if you ever fed KT anything you shouldn’t have,” Michelle said. She was scared of my mom and had had the pleasure of her unwavering company for the entirety of our DC filming. After the third spoonful, I quit out of fear that it would upset the baby’s tummy. I was sure that diarrhea or colic would be the poetic retribution for my flouting the precepts of proper Hindu dietary habits. It would serve me right, I thought. Poor little Krishna, she had to sit there and watch us slurp the famous dumplings I cannot even remember the taste of now.

  All the women in my family were psychotically particular about when and what foods you fed babies and children at every stage of their development. And I was about to get an earful from my grandma about the dos and don’ts of how to feed the newest member of our family. “Start with something savory, not sweet, as is often the custom, even among some of the extended members of our family,” Rajima sniffed. My grandmother felt that whatever food you first gave the baby would imprint itself upon her palette and establish certain expectations and tastes throughout her existence. Teach a child the pleasures of ea
ting well, and you affect that child for the rest of her life. Feed her sugar first, and the danger is that she will always come to expect it with every meal. For a race more prone to diabetes than any other, this was a perilous situation. And also, “Don’t go giving the baby everything in your big American fridge,” they admonished. Introduce one food at a time, cooked at home with just a pinch of salt. No tomatoes. No citrus. And whatever you do, do not give this child store-bought baby food.

  The advent of bottled and packaged baby food is, in my opinion, why many children have a hard time eating well when they graduate to real food in the United States. Most store-bought baby food has no mouth appeal, and certainly no flavor to speak of. While there are some nice new brands out there that strive to address the concerns of parents who want everything organic and cruelty-free and locally sourced, the actual appeal and taste of the food in question remains dismal. Somewhere along the line, after World War II, we were brainwashed into believing that we needed some multinational corporation to give us the food that was most wholesome and good for our progeny. We were conditioned to think that the big food brands knew better than we did what was best for our little ones, and that the food coming out of factories was superior to the food coming out of our own kitchens. Also, with more and more mothers entering the workforce during the 1970s and 1980s, it became that much easier for us to hand jars rather than recipes to those who cared for our children while we were away at work.

  But convenience aside, it’s much less expensive for us to make our own food. I remember being on Andy Cohen’s show with a former actress who had made a newly minted career for herself by extolling her philosophies on raising children in a kind manner. She once talked publicly (and regretted it later) of chewing up her baby’s food in her own mouth and feeding it to her child. While that seems extreme (I wondered why she didn’t just invest in an immersion or hand blender), I couldn’t help but think that as a society we have gotten so far from what is natural that a person who espoused regurgitating food was actually seen as sane and a viable way for the pendulum to swing back.

  It is so easy to give your children good nutrition as well as an appreciation of what good food is just by exposing them to it at an earlier age. The dirty truth is that many adult Americans don’t eat right and actually know it. That bottle of puce-colored strained peaches and pumpkin (one we’d never eat ourselves) gets handed to the unsuspecting baby out of fear and convenience. And before you know it, that child out in the real world discovers fried chicken nuggets with ketchup or pizza and doesn’t want to eat anything else. Who can blame her?

  All of this sanctimonious pontificating does not at all, by the way, excuse or explain why I gave Krishna beef broth that day. Later, on that sunny summer day in Chennai, it also added deep stress and a guilty docility to the proceedings of her annaprasanam ceremony. “You must control what food your child eats, and make sure only you or someone you trust touches that food. And don’t make the mistake of giving your baby bland food.” “Increase the seasonings slowly and gently, adding things like cumin and ginger when appropriate, or your child will forever be one of those boring people who doesn’t like anything but the most pedestrian of dishes.” “A person’s palate is like anything else, it must be trained, stimulated, cultivated, and buffered.” I certainly got an earful.

  “So if we aren’t giving payasam or kheer, what should we make for the puja?” I asked. I was really craving my Tha-Tha’s payasam; the smell of camphor and incense ignited a Pavlovian rumble in my tummy for the pleasing taste of starchy-sticky soft banana lumps, mashed into cardamom-infused, sweet, cold milk. “Pongal. Kichidi,” Rajima pronounced. “That’s what she will have.” “I told you,” Neela mouthed behind her. “No sugar in the first bite. We can give her a small square of kalkund or rock candy at the end maybe; we will need that, too, anyway, for the puja, but only at the end.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t feel like a grown woman with a child, but a child who had to be guided every step of the way through a dark culinary forest, lest I make some irrevocable mistake. I was told exactly what we were going to do, and I had no choice in the matter. I was informed by Rajima and Bhanu that they would pressure-cook the rice and lentils separately, and then they would be mashing the two together by hand with a little salt, and a mere few cumin seeds, not peppercorns, of course. Of course!

  I usually went along with whatever these women told me to do over the years, sometimes out of laziness, other times out of diplomacy. But this was my baby, and I wanted to have a hand in everything that happened to her. Why were they marginalizing me? Did they somehow know of our little transgression at the Singapore mall? Plus, I think I know a thing or two about food, after all. Still, in that house, on that green tile, I instantly became a child again, waiting for instructions on how not to break my new doll.

  It was decided after speaking to our priests that the ceremony would be done the following Saturday morning. First, the floor would be swept and washed well before sunrise. Then Neela would draw a traditional kollam or rangoli, a floral and geometric design made with flour and water paint, on the floor and let it dry. On top of that, a six-inch-high square pit would be made by stacking bricks to house the sacred fire in front of which the priests would recite Sanskrit Vedic prayers. My uncle Vichu, dressed in his Brahmin best of white veshti cloth and homespun kurta, would bring the fruits: whole small bananas and brown bearded coconuts set on silver plates before the ceremonial fire, along with little bowls my aunt Bhanu filled with vermillion powder, sandalwood paste, and vibhuti ash for our foreheads, and raw rice and little squares of rock candy that looked like a glittering brunoise of quartz crystal. There were flowers in platters and rosewater in a silver tumbler with an ornate spoon to pour it into the fire at the precise moment you were instructed to do so. A small brigade of priests, clothed in nothing but draped and twisted gold-edged white cotton and a sacred Brahmin thread draped across bare chests, with their foreheads smeared with three horizontal lines of vibhuti, would file into our home shortly after 9:00 a.m.

  The only task I was relegated to perform was to get myself and Krishna bathed and dressed on time. I was instructed to give her the first early-morning feeding but skip the 9:00 a.m. one so that she would be sufficiently hungry to open her mouth at the right moment in the ceremony. I never knew the baby to lack an appetite, but I knew when Jima meant business and so I didn’t dare veer off plan for a second.

  Neela had laid out a beautiful Madras plaid multicolored silk sari and blouse on the bed for me and even picked out Krishna’s outfit. It had taken me longer than usual to bathe Krishna that morning. Our bathroom consisted of two taps for hot and cold that filled up tall plastic buckets waiting below them. You had to wash standing up, using a mug to splash water on you, stop and soap yourself, and then rinse the same way. You could always hear when the neighbors were bathing next door because of the hard splash a mug of water made on the South Indian tile. I tried to keep Krishna contained by immersing her in one of the buckets. It was as tall as she was. This bought me a bit of time to shampoo my own hair without worrying about stinging her eyes while she splashed in her bucket. I had to quickly get both of us clean without monopolizing the hot water intended to serve the whole family. You could never perform a puja or any religious ceremony without freshly washing your hair and bathing. In fact, you weren’t even allowed to go to the temple when you had your period, as you were considered unclean. I always wondered how anyone would know, quite frankly. But then I guess God would know; as he or she surely knew about the beef broth!

  We oiled Krishna’s body, and she squealed and squirmed like a wet seal. She had silver-belled anklets in those days, so you always knew when she was awake or moving. She kicked into the air like she knew there was some excitement that centered solely on her. The ease of her age meant that I could place her in the center of the bed and while she could turn herself over, she was unable to move too much and therefore was safe. My brightly colored sari in intersecting squares
of orange, midnight-blue, green, and mustard-yellow rustled around me as I used too many pins to secure it for an Indian woman my age. My grandmother and the aunts in my family wouldn’t stoop to using any pins, but on this day I wanted to make sure my sari did not unravel in front of the priests. I quickly made the accordion folds in the center of my waist and tucked the pleats into my petticoat. I tied my hair back with fresh garlands of fragrant jasmine and put a small black adhesive bindi on Krishna’s forehead. She looked adorable, an amalgam of East and West, with sparkling light eyes and fair Caucasian skin molded onto recognizably Indian features and robed in gold brocade with burgundy-and-mustard-colored silk with her anklets jingling. When I had taken her to the temple the night before, full on a Friday evening, people pointed and called her “Gerber baby,” like the child in those baby-food ads with downy light hair and a cherubic smile. I found this funny and mortifying all at once.

  Outside our bedroom, which used to belong to Rajni and her parents, I could hear the hustle and bustle of preparations. I could hear my uncle Vichu’s voice asking my grandma if there was anything to munch on. “You’ll eat after the baby eats,” she scolded. A stroke she suffered several years ago had thwarted the dexterity in her right hand and arm, but had not diminished anything else to date. She was still ruling our roost with absolute authority. I was getting hungry, too. I could smell the puja fire and camphor being ignited. I could hear the jingle of a priest’s brass bell and his booming voice as he cleared his throat and gave orders about the proper placement of vessels to a younger priest.

  Soon I heard chanting and the familiar call of Rajima: “Padma, eh Padma! Inga va, velleela va!” “Come out here now,” she beckoned, not much different from when I was late for the St. Michael’s school bus. I smeared some kohl into my eyes and ran out with the baby. Outside in the living room sat the members of my family, of this old household, who were left in Chennai. In front of them were three priests in semicircle formation around the fire, on the embellished floor. I was instructed to sit at my uncle’s feet, with Neela on one side and Bhanu on the other. Krishna was placed on my lap and made to lie across. All of us were in our formal Benares silk saris and the heat and smoke from the puja fire were getting to me, making my eyes sting and water. With the chanting, the smell of incense, the fire and commotion, and being engulfed in the middle of a dazzling tangle of all our colorful saris, Krishna became fussy. She began to uncharacteristically wriggle and cry. While it worried me, it did not so much as ruffle Rajima. When I looked up at her, she immediately sensed what I was thinking. She raised her hand, bony fingers spread. “Don’t worry. She is supposed to cry. Her life will never be the same. You can’t give her everything.”