Within a couple of months I was fluent in English, but I was still being bullied for being African because I didn’t have the fly gear and my pops was not going to buy me anything above Payless knockoffs. I had to figure out how to make money. I started bagging groceries at the corner Dominican store, and people gave me their change. I remember the day I saved enough money to buy my first pair of white-and-blue Grant Hill I shoes. The smell of brand-new sneakers was heavenly; the fly designs with the big F and Fila on the base that continued into a wave of white on the side of the sneakers was immaculate. The first time I stepped out in them, I didn’t want to walk too fast because I didn’t want to put a crease or a stain on them. Fly sneakers in the hood earned you respect! And that day, I was respected. People were blown away. How the hell was this poor African kid able to afford these dope sneakers? It all started to come together once I started wearing fly gear, but it wasn’t until I discovered hip-hop that it all clicked. The Fugees, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang literally raised me. I knew side A of Ma$e’s tape Harlem World by heart, from beginning to end. There’s cool and then there’s hip-hop cool.
Fast-forward two years. I had completely lost my accent and I was down with hip-hop, doing everything possible to hide the fact that I was African. I spent most of my time hanging with a neighborhood crew. We got into a lot of trouble, but we had each other’s backs. No one could mess with me anymore. No one said my real name ever—my friends called me BJ. I was finally “cool.” But deep down I was a fraud, desperately trying to be someone I wasn’t, which was so obvious to everyone else except me. Eventually my boys asked: “What’s up with you? We know that you’re African. Why don’t you ever represent where you’re from?” That was a huge question for me to answer. While I was trying so hard to become American, I internalized all the pain and anger. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that I was ashamed of being African.
That realization made me do some serious soul-searching over the next couple of years. It is said, “When you submit your will to other people’s opinion, a part of you dies.” Well, I was dying inside, because I was a people pleaser. I spent most of my time trying to be something I wasn’t just so I could survive and fit in with my peers. I was trying to be my idea of cool. It wasn’t until I started studying acting in college that I allowed myself to emotionally explore how this internalized resentment affected my life. As an actor you have to draw from your own personal emotional bank to breathe life into characters. I did not have the capacity of being my authentic self. I usually said things for the sole purpose of having a desired effect on people. I had become a master manipulator. It was hard as hell to acknowledge it and be that vulnerable with others, but it was the most important self-improvement journey of my life. I started keeping a personal “emotional bank” journal as a way of training myself to express my true feelings. Over and over again, I would force myself to confront how I really felt about circumstances in my daily life that may have previously inspired me to default to people-pleasing or manipulating. Telling people what they wanted to hear was disempowering. Truly understanding the deep effects that this self-hatred was having on my soul was liberating.
I started doing some research to find African role models that I could look up to. I had a mirror in my room, and I put pictures of my African heroes all around its edges, so when I looked at myself, I saw them too. From Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary Burkinabe president who’s considered the African Che, to Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who started the Pan-African movement toward independence. I fell in love with the prime minister of Congo Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated by the CIA. Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Reading about these powerful black leaders and understanding the history and lasting effects of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism helped me understand the African struggle. I started to value the age-old traditions and saw the wisdom in them. I saw the beauty in respecting my elders. I learned to accept that my parents’ way of saying “I love you” was by praying for me and blessing me. Hip-hop played a big role in my journey. Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged album, Kanye’s The College Dropout, and Blitz the Ambassador’s Soul Rebel became the soundtrack to my search for authenticity.
I was curious and interested in connecting with the African community in NYC and sought to hang out with other Africans like me who grew up here but still honored their culture. It gave me a sense of purpose, belonging, and pride in being African. It was around that time that my acting career started taking off. As an artist, being authentic and having a distinct voice has been one of my greatest assets. I still have a lot of work to do, but I’ve made a lot of progress.
My past experiences have helped me define what it means to be American. It has nothing to do with speaking perfect English, trying to be the American version of cool, or fitting into a mold. It’s about celebrating the diverse cultures and heritage that enrich this country. It’s about playing your part to help make it a better one.
Becoming the best version of you is hard as hell—and it takes time. But as long as I’m doing that, I’m cool.
PHOTO BY ANTHONY JACKSON
Padma Lakshmi is a New York Times bestselling author, the host and an executive producer of Bravo’s Top Chef, and an ambassador for immigration/women’s reproductive health for the ACLU. She lives in New York with her daughter.
Padma Lakshmi
I HAVE NEVER BEEN a very religious person. My sweet mother would beg to differ. Seeking the best education America could provide her Indian Hindu child, she enrolled me in Catholic elementary school in Queens, New York. One day, while she was putting me to bed, I confessed that I was terrified because I ate some cookies without permission and thought Baby Jesus was going to be mad and send me straight to hell.
The next day she marched right into the principal’s office at drop-off to explain that it was the math and reading she was really paying for and that they were to exempt me from as much of the biblical religiosity as possible without offending their beliefs or other students. And so, from then on, and well into first grade, I was relegated to sitting in “Siberia”—at the back of the church—as my classmates rehearsed for their First Communion. I looked on longingly as they planned for their big day, replete with frills, shiny patent Mary Janes, and lacy white veils.
Catholicism seemed so much more glamorous and manageable to me than my own strange Hindu religion, rife with literally thousands of gods, goddesses, demigods, and semidemons, who could be good, bad, or just weird depending on what boons had been granted through a complicated series of Sanskrit-laden penances. Catholicism was straightforward. You did what Jesus said, or you went to hell—period and end of story. None of this attaining atman, dharma, or nirvana through years of penance or karma, and then only if you were in the right caste, horoscope, et cetera, et cetera. No “life is cyclical”; no “there are all these realms.” No layers of reincarnation before you even could entertain what the heck heaven was or meant.
Catholicism was pure, usually practiced in hushed tones with whispered prayers, and just one book to carry. There was only one serene-looking benevolent lady they called the Virgin, in a light blue veil, who always seemed to have her hands free and outstretched for holding the hands of children and shepherds, or clasped in prayer as she looked inexplicably, sheepishly, calmly off to the side (never mind the near-naked guy who liked to hang out on a cross with a really uncomfortable-looking crown who was supposed to be her son). The Catholic Church was peaceful, soothingly dark, and had order to it. Everyone seemed to know their place, their row or pew, and in what order to line up for their snack, given for being good until the end of mass, by the fully clothed and beautifully robed priest.
Hinduism, on the other hand, had several books and was cacophonous, loud, the chanting incessant, with no seeming beginning or end to its procedures, like mass, and no order ruling its patrons during any of these rituals. While, in truth, our blessed snacks or prasadams at the end were muc
h more varied, and did taste far better, one could never tell what was real food and what was “blessed” food and therefore was required, mandatory eating. Add to this fact that our priests were scantily clad in white loincloths and it wasn’t enough to kneel and say brief prayers at bedtime and go to church before brunch on Sundays. No, you had to actually wake up at five each morning as my mom did, to bathe, light the oil lamp and incense, and sit on the floor uncomfortably cross-legged and read scriptures from the Ramayana and chant prayers a hundred and eight times before you got to get up. I would take ten Hail Marys any day.
My well-meaning, immigrant mother, trying mightily to preserve my heritage and spiritual culture in spite of our American surroundings, sent me to India every summer for three months as soon as school got out in June, to help me retain my all-important Indianness. When I returned from India for second grade, my mother was delighted to take me to the newly consecrated Hindu temple in Flushing. This, at the time, consisted of only one big plain room that had a modest deity in it, with no architectural flourish whatsoever. Where were the church bells in a tower; the ominous-sounding organ, or, at the very least, the large imposing stone carved structures with gandharvas; or voluptuous women figurines, like in the cone-shaped temples I had just left in South India? My mom would definitely have to try harder if I was going to forsake Jesus. I couldn’t believe this is what my mother thought would seduce me away from the cult of Mary and the Holy Ghost (whoever that was).
I knew enough even back then not to openly ridicule her though. My mother’s piousness ran deep, and this was indicated to me whenever I came to her with a problem that invariably originated from some culture clash or other. My mother, while thinking she could really help, simply said that I should pray to Ganesh for guidance. (We were more like the Catholics than she knew!) In truth, my mother found it hard to navigate the straits of American culture with her young daughter. She was more liberal than most mothers and certainly most Indians, but she held tight to those aspects of our heritage that gave her comfort, religion being the strongest.
So she often took me to the temple against my will. I begrudgingly uttered some scant prayers I could not help but absorb through sheer repetition of exposure and counted the minutes before we went home so I could watch the hours and hours of television I relished as my right as a “typical (Indian) American kid.” She, on the other hand, flourished at the temple. She reveled in knowing all the prayers, bowed at exactly the right time, and put the second-tier priests who were forced to slum it in America to shame. She didn’t particularly like hanging out with other Indian immigrants—she found them too clannish—but she was fine rubbing elbows with them while they all prostrated themselves, my mother always being the one with the deepest bow. It was this performance that reassured my mother’s own insecurity that she had abandoned all righteous connections to our culture in order to have the freedom and happiness she craved in America, away from her abusive marriage, away from judgment, except of course, that of her own guilty conscience. In truth, my mom had nothing to worry about. She was living out her own American dream of self-reliance, financial independence, and liberated freedom. Which is why I was so baffled by her shackle-like connection to our arcane belief in an elephant-headed God who could grant wishes and good luck on school exams.
After elementary school, we moved to the West Coast and I was spared these temple visits due to the fact that the nearest Hindu temple was in Malibu, some fifty miles from our home in San Gabriel Valley, in Southern California. And while my Indian mother became more Americanized, long opting for pants and dresses instead of cumbersome saris, she still rose at 5:00 a.m. daily. To this day the wafting smell of incense and toast makes me think I am late for school.
Then one day, in the first semester of my freshman year of high school, I became gravely ill. What started out as the common flu quickly progressed to a serious and rare form of Stevens-Johnson syndrome. At first, no one could figure out what was wrong with me, and my fever was dangerously high, with no sign of going down. My mother, after taking me to one hospital and finding no answers, moved me within days to a research center called City of Hope, where she worked as a nurse. I developed lesions in my mouth, eyes, and nose that were so severe, I had to sleep sitting up so that I could breathe and wouldn’t choke on my own saliva. I was blind and mute at the same time for three weeks. But the doctors there gave me amazing care, and in short order treated my symptoms. While I had lost an enormous amount of weight and was quite frail, I began to be well enough to go home. I left the hospital in her arms. This was on a Friday.
My distraught, worried mother had mentally promised her Hindu gods that if she could finally bring her little girl home from the hospital, she would immediately do penance, by driving to the temple and making an offering in gratitude. My mother was big on ritual at the best of times, so she was taking her promise to God very seriously. Forty-eight hours after I came home, bundled in blankets and with Band-Aids still covering my IV pockmarks, my mother and I piled into the front seat of our red Ford Mercury with my stepdad, who drove, and headed to Malibu on the Hollywood Freeway.
I was still too sick to even exit the car. Sick enough that my folks thought it best to wedge me between them in the long couch version of the front seat that cars of the time had. This way my mom could tend to me. I stayed there in the car while they both exited and did their praying and prostrating at the temple. I heard the chants of the priests and the tinny sound of brass bells shaken by hand. I smelled the incense and camphor that by now was as familiar to me as lentils and rice at dinnertime. Eventually, my mother returned with a Styrofoam plate with some yellow lemon rice, and other foods that had been part of the sacred offering during the pujas, or ritual prayers. These prasadams I knew I could never refuse. Never mind that it hurt to eat, that I still had lesions in my mouth, which the food stuck to. I began to gingerly take small bites as my parents reentered the car, vermillion powder and holy ash smeared on their foreheads.
Traffic was heavy on that Sunday. And it was about to be even heavier. On the way back from the temple, our car would be rear-ended so hard, that it careened down an embankment. It would be twelve hours after the accident before I found out both my parents had survived and were indeed alive. They had taken me to one hospital, while airlifting my folks to another with a trauma center where a helicopter could land.
The months after the car accident involved many surgeries and so many weekly hours of physical therapy for all of us. The season would change and the school year would be over before we finally said goodbye to all the home-health nurses who lived with us around the clock. It would be years before my mom ever drove on the freeway again, even though she hadn’t been the one driving that fateful Sunday. And it would be decades before I would ever enter a temple again.
What kind of God would allow an innocent sick girl and her family to be involved in such an accident after all the suffering we had already gone through with my unknown illness? While I had long let go of my fascination with Catholicism as a means to fit in with my American peers, I now saw no reason to entertain my mother’s illogical attachment to our, né her Hindu religion. I became a teenage atheist. And I somehow lumped all the aspects of my Indian culture into the basket I was now throwing out in disillusion and disgust. I had no faith, not in God or saris or samosas. No need for the most vital aspect of my identity because to my adolescent reasoning, it had only brought me strife, teasing, isolation, and otherness. It had set me apart, and not in any good or positive way I could discern.
I couldn’t wait to get away. Years passed as I waited for my future to begin. Lonely yet never alone. I applied only to colleges on the other coast, far away from the aroma of curry and the limitations of my Indian home life. After college, I moved to Europe and spent my twenties there before returning to America and marrying an atheist, albeit an Indian one. My family would have to wrap their heads around the fact that there was to be no mention of God at my wedding, because my husband
and I did not want to feel hypocritical.
I would divorce the atheist for reasons altogether unspiritual and start life over. It was during this period in my late thirties that I got a call one day from my cousin who had moved to the States in the intervening years from India, to meet her at the temple. She lured me there saying she didn’t have time to meet me in Manhattan, but that the temple had a canteen in the basement and she thought I would enjoy lunch there with her and her husband. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was pregnant with my first nephew and had wanted to do an offering there to bless her pregnancy. Rajni and I had grown up like sisters, and on all those summer trips back home to India, we had bonded over things large and small but seldom shared the ritual of going to temple together. Still I was happy we were reconnecting as adults now that she had joined me on the East Coast, so I could not refuse her request.
I arrived to find a big gray-blue structure nestled between row houses. There were some parts of the building that were still under construction, but it was easy to spot the high-carved conical peak sprouting above the residential housing. Rajni was not overly pious herself, and, in truth, our whole extended family tends to be quite secular, so I knew something was up when I saw how tenderly her husband, Ananth, marked her forehead with vermillion and holy ash, as they walked circles around the huge Ganesh deity that sat in the middle of the temple. Around the deity in the great hall were other gods and goddesses, each with his or her own corner, adorned with flowers, silk fabric, and jewels. The priest rang the big brass bell that hung by a rope in front of the Ganesh figure and as it echoed through us, I took mental note of this sweet gesture. We then went down to check out the supposedly amazing food in the basement.
American Like Me Page 5
