Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  He knew what I did not. I would now be an outsider for the rest of my life. My parents’ divorcing had made me one in India already. He wanted to arm me with as much information, to pad my insertion into the new world to come, because he knew that I had to become an American child. I could only hope to survive if I made that identity mine. And when I returned “home,” to India, I would be an outsider there, too, because I had tasted the West.

  I realize now that he must have lavished me with so much attention to compensate for the permanent loss of my father and the spells spent without my mother, and later perhaps because he knew the circumstances of my return. Regardless, his affections were in full force. And as they say, women often seek in their partners what they saw in their fathers. For me, my doting grandfather played that role. His were the qualities I came to crave, those of a mentor, an older, wiser man. Indeed, Tha-Tha was my first mentor. It seems to me now that over the years, rather than searching for other father figures, I perhaps searched more for other mentors.

  Daniele was my second mentor, when I was a new model, fresh off the boat in Milan. Here was a man with money and choices, and he chose me. He was the perfect boyfriend for that period in my life, both cultural mentor and badge of my own worth. After my modeling career petered out, I started to crave approval for my mind, in many ways long dormant during my stint in fashion. Salman played the same role—times ten. My love for him was as real as it was for Daniele. But our emotional needs supply some of the kindling necessary for that initial spark. And whether you know it or not, they help define the at-first blurry vision of the man with whom you imagine yourself walking hand in hand. When I met Salman, I had just come off the ego boost of several years of modeling and cohosting a talk show with the highest ratings in Italy. Yet moving back to the U.S., I left these successes behind and essentially started over. I’d entered a much more competitive job market as a woman who was, by the harsh standards of show business, past her prime. My hard-won self-approval had begun to evaporate.

  When I was a girl, my confidence came from doing well at school, a goal set by a family full of strivers with graduate degrees. While I knew KCK and my mother were proud of my success as a model, I also knew they expected more from the girl who idolized her high school English teacher and looked forward to Academic Olympiad meetings as much as most girls did school dances. As my mom always reminded me, whenever I sulked about some small failure in Milan or Paris, beauty is not an accomplishment. This was her way of comforting me by noting the arbitrary nature of the modeling world, where no matter how skilled you were at posing, walking, and talking, you landed jobs because of your God-given cheekbones and waistline. Yet I also knew that, while she was too kind to admit it, she had higher hopes for me.

  Salman mentored my intellect. After spending my twenties grooming my outer self and my manners, I was ready to groom my mind. His love and support gave me confidence to pursue my writing in a way I might not have without him. I began writing for magazines, as well as signed a second book contract. I started to consider new endeavors, a jewelry line and a line of teas and spices. Before my husband, I don’t think I would have thought I was capable enough to attempt those things—he had buoyed me up and been a considerable, if unwitting, cheerleader. The way Salman made me take myself more seriously was not dissimilar to how my body image changed when someone like Helmut Newton thought differently of my scar.

  Surprise, surprise, Teddy was an older, more accomplished man. In other words, prime Padma bait—a worm to a fish, a fish to a bear, a mango to an Indian girl. This time, however, I wasn’t biting, or so I thought. The recent failure that was my divorce had convinced me that I needed to change my patterns. So unlike Salman’s, Teddy’s early calls went unanswered. Goodness knows he was persistent. He was used to getting his way. He’d call my office every twenty minutes if he couldn’t reach me on my cell phone. He’d insist that my assistant slip me a note or pull me out of a meeting. At first, I gave in out of pure fascination with the man. We were so different. I had gone to PS 158; he went to Andover. I like boxing; he liked golf. I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. He was quite the conservative.

  We started to spend more time with each other over the second half of that summer, in 2007, once I had moved into the Surrey. Ours was not a perfect love story. It was an improbable one. When I first met Teddy I could not imagine ever being involved with someone like him. Not only because of his age, but also because he was so utterly different from me in every way. He was a Republican, a staunch one, who displayed in his home framed photos of himself with both George Bush Senior and Junior. I am a Democrat, one whose libido was curtailed by having to look at such pictures, and I told him so. He removed them. He was also a faithful, churchgoing Catholic, and when I say churchgoing, I mean he never, not ever, missed a Sunday Mass; not when we were sailing in the Caribbean and not when we went to Mumbai. In fact, even when he was in the Hamptons, he would arrange his return to the city based on whether he intended to attend church on Long Island or in Manhattan. Because his helicopter couldn’t land in Southampton after sunset to pick him up, he’d have to plan on leaving in time to make Mass in the city. This meant missing a considerable part of his Sunday at the beach. But he did it and without grumbling. I, by contrast, was a pretty secular Hindu, going to my local temple in Queens mostly on major holidays. Though after the temple installed a canteen in the basement, my family noticed a considerable spike in my piousness (they serve the best masala dosas this side of Chennai).

  Teddy was from another time, chivalrous to a fault. He was very mindful of respecting boundaries and never strayed from the principles he lived by. In the beginning, after that trip to L.A. on his plane, we didn’t really date. We had dinner a few times, often with his sons, and he always picked me up and dropped me off at my hotel’s front door. My husband had never picked me up; we always met at the restaurant or event. The only time we arrived somewhere together was when we had left the house together and shared the taxi, which I usually hailed for us on our corner.

  But even beyond politics and religion there was a comically large list of differences between us. Teddy was not adventurous with food by any means. He hated spicy food, preferred fried chicken to chicken curry, enjoyed steak and pot de crème, not tacos and falafel. He liked country music. He was very athletic, playing golf with Vijay Singh and tennis with the Bryan brothers regularly. I only became sporty at thirty, when my vanity kicked in and I took up boxing to stay fit.

  But Teddy and I connected emotionally, to both of our surprise. “I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in, Junior,” he said once. He had always felt like a loner, and excelled at compartmentalizing the disparate elements of his life. He had traveled so far spiritually from his early life in Connecticut, and all he had been through in the intervening years—more time than I’d been alive—gave him empathy for where I was now. He was the most confident man I had ever met, and yet he confessed that there had been times when, before a big gamble, he’d been as afraid as a little boy.

  Teddy was old-fashioned in almost every way. Even though I had sought out a divorce months before we’d met, that first summer, when I’d visit him at his home in the Hamptons, he’d insist on accommodating me in a guest room. This charmed me to no end. Finally, I thought, a man who gives me some space! But his adherence to decorum could also perplex me. Just before I moved into the Surrey, Dr. Seckin performed another endo-related surgery on me. Teddy was considerably worried for my well-being, laid up as I was, alone again in that big house. He sent a bushel of flowers but refused to come visit me because, he said, “It isn’t right to enter another man’s house, even if we’re only friends. I know what my intentions are in my heart. And I don’t belong there.”

  I had never met a man like him before.

  Teddy was so well read, though wore it lightly and by the end of summer had devoured several tomes on Churchill and Gandhi, the history of India and its independence. He was a history buff, and he relishe
d spouting obscure facts about Indian history at the dinner table both to check my own knowledge and to irk me. But deep down, this seduced me, too. I was touched that someone as busy as he was would voluntarily take serious free time to learn about my culture. Even with all his responsibilities at work (which included managing four companies, not only IMG), and his dedication to his boys, he somehow made ample time to woo me and make me feel he was always there for me. I didn’t know where he got his energy. But while I was unbelievably lucky to have the full beam of his love shine on my life, I was also intimidated and overwhelmed by it. I had just come from a situation where I felt I wasn’t meeting someone’s expectations of me, and I knew agreeing to be the partner or girlfriend of a man like Teddy came with similar requirements. In spite of all the wooing, I was strangely despondent. I wasn’t ready for Teddy. I couldn’t understand why such a person, or any person, could be that kind, that patient, without wanting anything in return from me except my happiness.

  So whenever we began to get too close, I came up with a reason to back off. He was too old for me, too unlike me, too pushy. But every time I’d tell him I couldn’t see him anymore, I found myself missing his counsel, his knowledge, his wicked sense of humor. I missed his presence. I had to exert effort not to call him. For a time, my practical side won out. Fortunately, he was Teddy and he found ways to get his message across. He’d call my girlfriends and pull them out of meetings. His gumption makes me laugh now.

  I was, in my way, seeking mentorship from Teddy, too, pumping him for advice while I started my jewelry business and began to build Easy Exotic spices and teas. Even though I was unsure I could be with him long-term, I thought that through our friendship he would impart to me a practical kind of entrepreneurial wisdom. But I was so naïve there, too. What Teddy wound up schooling me in was not business acumen, although he did indulge my every question and help me develop that aspect of myself. Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn’t my grandfather. And I didn’t know what to do with it at all. If only I’d embraced our differences sooner. I didn’t know it then, but we had so little time left.

  chapter 10

  He called me “Junior.” Occasionally, he called me “Madam” when he wanted to make me the bad cop—as in “I’d be happy to join you at the Red Sox game, but Madam will never go for that.” But he used “Junior” the most, his way of poking fun not just at our vast age difference, but also at my fixation on it. I called him “Duke.”

  We came up with his nickname on a trip we took to India in the spring of 2008. Teddy had never been to India. Four times before we met, he had planned to travel there on business, had even received the requisite immunizations, only to cancel his plans at the last minute. India seemed a world away to him and I could tell the whole idea made him tired. But I also knew the country and its history fascinated him. He felt that to fully realize his goals of expanding his company’s interests, he would surely need to confront India at some point. Having me in tow to be a guide of sorts made the trip more surmountable. A few of his employees even took bets on whether he’d make it there. (Tom Ritz lost money, but was pleased for us.)

  We were going to be staying in Jaipur, Rajasthan, at the Taj Rambagh Palace, once the residence of the maharajah of Jaipur, which his family now operated as a lavish hotel. Before Teddy made the reservation, I had told him to not give them my real name. I often used an alias to check into hotels, to avoid unwanted attention. To keep the ruse simple, I always used the same name, which was—as a nod to my family, who might need to find me—my uncle’s surname, Nathan. My full alias was “Dr. P. Nathan.” Teddy thought this was hilarious. “What, you’re a Jewish orthopedist now?” he joked the first time he heard it, then gleefully set out to come up with his own nom de hotel.

  I rejected out of hand his first suggestion, Pee Wee Reese, the name of one of his favorite baseball players. “A real star,” he said, smirking, “in the forties and fifties.” (Again, because he knew it bugged me, he took great pleasure in underscoring his age.) The point, I reminded him, was to be inconspicuous. “Pee Wee Reese” was anything but. So he chose the name of another player, Duke Snider, a name recognizable to fans, maybe, but sufficiently unobtrusive for our jaunt in South Asia.

  On our last night at the hotel, we returned to our room to a letter bearing the royal seal. Teddy opened it. It was from the grandson of the maharajah, who ran the hotel. His grandfather, he wrote, had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fanatic and would have been honored to know Duke Snider was staying at his residence. Teddy loved this letter. When we got home, he had it framed and hung it in his office next to Mandela’s tin plate.

  And so, we were Duke and Junior. We made an odd pair. As I said, we didn’t pray to the same god or like the same foods. Let me tell you, though, of the two, our Hindu-Catholic union was nowhere near as troublesome for me as our gastronomic mismatch. For such a worldly man, his tastes were shockingly pedestrian. When we were together in India, he subsisted almost exclusively on scrambled eggs, toast, and club sandwiches with ketchup. In fact, everywhere we went, he ate club sandwiches. I teased him that he was single-handedly responsible for the club sandwich’s omnipresence on room-service menus throughout the world. He loved steak and Italian food, especially when we were eating at stalwart Manhattan restaurants like Sistina, Elio’s, and Il Mulino, where the waiters wore ties, the customers were important, and the portions were large.

  What made his culinary limitations even more fascinating to me was that they existed despite his ability to eat anything anywhere he damn well pleased. Someone of his means could fly to Tokyo on a Monday just to eat uni and o-toro at Sukiyabashi Jiro. He could lunch the next day at L’Arpège in Paris, then pop over to Catalonia to grab a late dinner at elBulli. But for Teddy, the height of culinary achievement was a dry-aged rib eye. While I’ve been known to ramble on about “succulent” this and “glistening” that, the highest compliment he could pay any food was “Now, that’s a good-looking steak.”

  At first, his stubbornness frustrated me. I wanted to share my love of food, my conviction that food could be—no, was—an adventure, with him. But I grew to love that about him. He made no pretense about his food preferences. And when you hang around ramen obsessives and fried chicken fanatics, as I happily do, someone who has no great interest in food can actually be a refreshing presence, a reminder of how much else there is to experience. As he’d gently chide me, “I know Picasso, you know pasta.”

  Part of the fun we had was catering to each other’s desires, though he was both a better caterer and a better sport. Sure, I didn’t gripe when Teddy flew in for dinner while I was filming Top Chef Chicago and insisted on dining at Gibsons, even though I was already gorged and distended. The steakhouse seemed to specialize in Flintstones-sized portions. His rib eye looked like it clocked in at just under five pounds. Even my Caesar salad came in what appeared to be a small rowboat.

  Teddy, however, did a lot more than “not gripe” when I got an itch to try somewhere or something new. In the fall of 2009, for no particular reason at all—not my birthday, not Valentine’s Day—he told me he wanted to take me on a fantasy food tour. You choose the restaurants, he said, I’ll get you there. I named the two most exciting places in the world. He told me to pack my bags. Our first stop was to be elBulli. A week or two before the meal, Ferran Adrià, the chef of elBulli, very kindly e-mailed to ask if we had any allergies. Thank you for asking, I wrote, before I began my lengthy catalog of Teddy’s aversions: olives, oysters, chilies . . .

  Destination number two was Noma, the legendary Copenhagen restaurant. The food at Noma was Teddy’s worst nightmare, whereas I couldn’t have been more excited to try René Redzepi’s pioneering neo-Nordic cuisine. I’d read all about the young phenom’s fetish for foraging, for resurrecting ingredients once eaten but long forgotten, like tr
ee bark, moss, and ants. Redzepi was famous for using almost exclusively products found or produced in the Nordic region: sea buckthorn, cloudberries, wild sorrel. His dishes reveal the arbitrary nature of our food system. We eat such a small portion of what’s edible. Most of us pay dearly for prewashed arugula, even as we trample (edible, delicious) dandelions on the way home. To eat at Noma is to be transported to a very particular place, away from the world in which food travels thousands of miles before it reaches you, the world in which, no matter your location, you always have access to tomatoes, lemons, and cumin. Each dish at Noma disorients, gloriously: the ingredients provide a window into the past, while the presentation and techniques abut the future. To Teddy, the restaurant was nonsense.

  His proof came with the first course. Seated at our blond wood table, adorned with the usual stemware, plates, and a vase filled with a few red flowers, we watched as our waiter arrived empty-handed. With a smile, he told us that our first course had already arrived. “Where?” we said as we stared down at the empty plates in front of us. “Right here,” he said, gesturing at the vase. The flowers in it were nasturtiums, delicate and sweet with a nose-tickling radish-like bite. And tucked inside each one was a surprise: an edible snail. What I had thought were decorative sticks were actually malt bread.