Love, Loss, and What We Ate

by Padma Lakshmi

  I realized what Rajima meant. Until that moment, I had been almost exclusively providing everything Krishna could want or need. I was her sole succor and haven. But her needs were changing. She would now need sustenance from the earth, from Mother Nature, from the world, or at least Whole Foods. She would need more than what I could give her from my own body. We prayed for Krishna to have a bountiful world around her always, for her to have health, and abundance, for her to have plenty. We prayed for her to have a good, wholesome relationship with what feeds her.

  But in that moment, I prayed for her to always need me. I prayed to whatever god we were all chanting to, to always be able to feed her, if not from my breast then from the fruits of my own labor. I prayed for a full hand whenever I raised it to Krishna’s mouth. I was acutely aware of all the people in this room and across oceans who had helped me through the most difficult transition of my life. I had not taken the path to motherhood alone. Outside, I heard the crows caw in the big tabebuia tree that shaded the veranda. For a second I imagined I even heard the echo of my grandfather singing hymns in his old creaky wicker chair, but I knew that couldn’t be so. It was probably someone else’s grandpa down the lane. The sun came in through the open veranda door. The heat was rising fast. It was almost 10:00 a.m.

  My grandmother emerged with a small katori, or bowl, with mashed-up lentils and rice from the kitchen. Her hand, wrinkled and worn, had mixed rice for every child of our family in this house for over thirty-five years. It was the same hand that had braided and oiled my hair, drawn countless marks of vermillion on my forehead, and had even landed hard on the side of my thigh when needed. This hand had shown Neela how to pleat her sari, and Bhanu the right way to burp Rajni and Rohit. It was the same hand that mixed batches of our secret house recipe for sambar curry powder twice a year, wielded the ladle of dosa batter when I first learned to make the fluffy thin crepes on the iron griddle, and administered Tiger Balm to KCK’s temples in the days when his head ached from the monsoon heat.

  For a moment, I thought she might be the one to feed Krishna herself. I was keeping a low profile, doing as I was told. After handing me the bowl, she bent over, with agility, impossibly low, and applied a line of holy vibhuti ash across Krishna’s forehead as she lay writhing in annoyance. “Ippo, nee punnu,” Rajima said. “Now you do it.” Then I heard my mother’s voice, coming from a table where an open laptop was perched. She was tuning in via Skype and commanding me from Los Angeles. “Come on, Pads, the baby’s hungry!” I snapped to attention and placed a small espresso spoon of kichidi into the baby’s mouth. At first she coughed and sputtered but in mere seconds, she seemed to be mashing the pap with her tongue against the roof of her mouth like an old toothless man. Everyone in the room seemed to exhale at once. I heard the hearty belly laughs of the priests.

  I thought then that for the first time in my life, in that house, these women were finally saying: “Okay, you’re up. It’s your turn.” For the first time, I did not feel like a minor, a junior, or a half pint. For the women in my family, I had finally made it to full adulthood, into their club, the big league. For a second I mourned not only the final extinguishing of my girlhood, but the further separation, though ever so slight, between my body and Krishna’s.

  The two things I remember about every important day or evening of my life are what I wore and what I ate. In fact, I can say with great conviction that food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

  Since I can remember, people have asked me the same question: How do I eat so much and stay slim? The answer is simple: a lot of hard work. Much of the work is physical, some of it mental, all of it involving vast amounts of willpower and discipline I don’t always have. A good chunk is emotional and intuitive. One of the biggest moments in my life in food was a quiet one. An internal event, silent and profound, it happened about a month after childbirth, when I hadn’t lost any of the forty-five pounds I had gained. I had expected to bounce back, with moderate exercise and breast-feeding. But I hadn’t bounced back at all. In fact, I had gained six and a half pounds—the weight of my new baby—in the two weeks after giving birth. In that moment, I understood that the most important part of “getting my body back” was not going to be exercising, or the discipline to do it after I had been up all night and worked all day. It was not going to be portion control or exerting the willpower it took not to reach for cookies or pizza. It was not even the time it would take to prepare healthy meals or count calories. Although I did do all of that, as much as I humanly could.

  It was going to have to be the emotional work that got not only my body back, but also my confidence. I just decided that I wasn’t going to be upset if I didn’t lose the weight. I didn’t expect miracles and I was fine with being my new size. My baby was the miracle. My body had given me the greatest gift, one that I had been told I shouldn’t hope for. I was not going to feel bad about how I looked or expect to fulfill some vain image I had of myself. After a lifetime of being in front of the camera, I had to give up relying on my figure as a source of status, even if making my living still involved my physical appearance somewhat. So I became consciously pragmatic about the expectations I put on my body, on my self. I was truly, deeply okay with not losing the weight, in case that was what turned out to be my future.

  It took a great amount of soul-searching and humility to come to terms with the fact that the good old days were gone and might not return again. That’s not to say I didn’t hope that all the other things I was doing would pay off. But I wasn’t like other models and colleagues who walked the runway in their skivvies eight days after giving birth. I didn’t appear on the cover of a weekly magazine after four or even six months, showing off a new postbaby “bikini body.” Dear reader, it took me an entire year, thirteen months actually, to work off the weight I had gained in pregnancy. And that was just fine.

  There were simply other things that were way more important to me, chief among them spending time with my daughter. But also trying to make things up to Teddy, and in general just finding a sense of normalcy again by putting the turmoil of the last twenty months behind us. I admit it was very hard not to feel depressed, insecure, and inferior. Stripped of my old figure, I had to get used to the new me. For a woman who had led my particular life, my body and its physical appearance were tied not only to my livelihood but to my womanhood and sense of worth. This is true for a lot of women, even those who don’t work in front of the camera. Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

  I had had the experience of being betrayed by my own womanhood because of endometriosis and the resulting lifetime of chronic pain, but then my womb had miraculously come through when no one thought it could. This gave me a new perspective on my body. My body had created this beautiful baby and was now sustaining her. For the first time in my life I consciously placed less value on how I looked. It just wasn’t as important to me. I was profoundly thankful for what my body had produced.

  In the span of just a few years, I had finally discovered what my condition was, struggled with the anger provoked by not having been diagnosed earlier, and then faced the sorrow of learning it was almost certain I couldn’t have children. Wondering w
hat would happen to my career if I couldn’t lose the baby weight made me force myself to accept a reality I had not often considered. My looks were an asset I had consciously or unconsciously benefited from all my life.

  When you have spent most of your adult life one way, and suddenly that changes, it’s hard not to freak the hell out. And it’s hard not to be distracted or worry about not meeting everyone’s expectations, as well as your own, about an issue that is very central to many women’s lives. So the only way I knew to not be distracted or disheartened by my weight gain was by making myself feel okay, good even, about my new size.

  Making peace with myself about my body was the single most important thing I did to get my figure back. I just told myself that even if I did all the things I could to achieve my goals and I didn’t get the expected result, I would not feel bad about myself. I refused to let the shape of my body get me down. And that released me from the yoke I think all of us suffer under, whether postpregnancy or not. It freed me of the tyranny of my own mind and my self-judgments, all of which were based on an objectified view of who I was.

  It worked. I actually began to love my body and wore clothes to show off my extra pounds and roundness. And when I talk about curves, I mean a double-F poitrine. And when I speak of being bigger, I mean going from a size 4 to a size 14. It was then that people started saying again how good I looked. I hadn’t lost an ounce but I began to carry myself differently, move differently. I was really proud of my larger size, and enjoyed it. I began to feel womanly in a much earthier way. And I was much more brazenly confident than I had been when I had my usual slim figure. It was very weirdly exciting. I didn’t suck in my belly and I didn’t hide my size with clothing. I began to genuinely revel in my form. I threw away my newly bought postpregnancy Spanx (which I had hated with a passion all during filming the DC Top Chef promo shoot).

  Because just as everybody is not meant to be a size 4, we all are meant to be different sizes at different times in our lives. We are meant to eat different things at different moments. Our needs shift as life shifts.

  chapter 15

  When Krishna was just about a year old, we went to film the Top Chef finale in the Bahamas. The whole crew was looking forward to getting away. It was still cold in New York City, where we were based. The winter had not yet given us any reprieve. We arrived at a huge, sprawling “family resort.” This was not some tucked-away little beach village but a mini-city of various high-rises built in a semicircle configuration with swimming pools below and lounge chairs galore, leading all the way down to the shore, complete with bar and food service, DJs and lifeguards, pool activities and cabana boys. The resort had all the charm of a large white cruise ship, groaning with people, that goes nowhere. Off in the distance behind the towers you could see a large hybrid water slide–roller coaster. There was also an extensive aquarium in the main lobby, and many shops and restaurants.

  Luckily, we were put in the building of time-share apartments rather than in the thick of the hotel. I didn’t like the idea of Krishna eating hotel room service for so many days on end, so I made sure everywhere we stayed when traveling had a kitchen. I was looking forward to shooting, to let the baby have some sunshine. Adam came down to be with her. She was still nursing. It was and had been an awkward year.

  The baby always went to see Adam in his New York hotel room, accompanied by my mom and our nanny, as well as a bodyguard. I felt compelled to have a private security officer follow Krishna when she went to see her father that first year. I had become afraid: of the press following us, which they did; of Adam deciding to do something drastic in the moment; and of my mother and the nanny being put in a vulnerable position. I wanted the women to have some support in that environment.

  Adam became to me a completely unknown entity. I could not believe this was the same man who had built me the swing and accompanied me to India. But I wasn’t going to make the mistake of misjudging things again, not when it came to my daughter or my mother. There wasn’t much communication between me and Adam at all, and what was there was extremely fraught. I still felt very intimidated and threatened by him because of the incident in the hospital.

  To be fair, Adam had e-mailed me and left voice messages, too, apologizing for his atrocious behavior. But now that I had seen that side of him, it frightened me to the core. It was the same fear and dread I had felt growing up, when Peter raised his voice or lost his temper. I wanted nothing to do with that kind of person. And I was worried, to say the least, that the baby would regularly be around someone capable of that kind of anger. I hadn’t ever had a traditional relationship with Adam. We usually met for a date somewhere private, or hung out in a group with each other’s very close friends or family for a finite period of only a few weeks at a time. We were never a regular couple, exposed to the trials and tests that committed couples face. I had no insight on how he handled stress or reacted to adversity. During the time I had known him, prior to my getting pregnant, he had only done everything to please me, or to present himself as a mild-mannered and even-tempered person. Now I had no idea with whom I was dealing, and Krishna and I were tied to him for the rest of our lives. We were all under strain, in a terrible pressure cooker of hurt feelings, fear, anger, and mutual resentment. I think the force of that pressure was too much for Adam, and he blew up. But some bells are hard to unring.

  The effect of the blowup in the hospital would estrange Adam and me for the better part of the first four and a half years of Krishna’s life. And the worst of that time was about to begin.

  It was in the gorgeous and sunny Bahamas, with white sand and pleasant beaches filled with happy families on vacation, that I got word that Adam and I were about to go to war.

  We were filming a lunch and then Judges’ Table with several guest judges whom we had expressly flown in for the finale, like Morimoto and Michelle Bernstein, among others. The set was a glass-encased dining room in a building on one of the neighboring properties. The room was stifling, trapping the warm sun pouring in. I was sitting across from Wolfgang Puck. Suddenly, in the middle of asking for feedback from the other judges, I heard through my earpiece that we were stopping for a second. Then a producer stepped over to me on the set and quietly handed me her cell phone. She asked me to step away from the table. Because the next chef’s food was about to be served, we took a very short break. I went outside into sunlight so violently bright, I could barely keep my eyes open.

  My publicist, Christina, was on the line. She informed me that the New York Post and the New York Daily News had both phoned her separately. Both tabloids had in their possession a copy of a court filing submitted by plaintiff Adam Dell against defendant Padma Lakshmi. They asked if I had any comment on the lawsuit. I had no idea any such legal action had been filed. Immediately I felt faint, despite the large meal I had just consumed on the set. Christina said the documents seemed authentic. I put her on hold and called my attorney, who not only had handled my divorce quietly and quickly years prior, but had also been dealing with Adam’s lawyer. After Krishna’s birth, the attorneys had drafted an agreement pertaining to visitation for the first year of Krishna’s life that both Adam and I signed. Adam started agitating to negotiate a new one even before half the term of that first agreement had expired. The Dell lawyers had been threatening legal action for some time, repeatedly insinuating that I had far more to lose than Adam. I resented the implied threats to ruin my name and reputation, and thus my career, and they deepened my sense that Krishna’s father was not to be trusted.

  It would be another twenty-four hours before my attorneys received our copy of the filing. The rest of my conversation with Christina and my attorney seemed to take place in a fugue state. It would be the only time in twelve seasons of Top Chef that I went missing from my chair at Judges’ Table. When I got back to my chair, Tom and Gail could see that the color in my face had drained. I had no choice but to continue with filming, but it was as if someone had turned down the volume on all of my senses. I c
ouldn’t walk off the set fast enough.

  I was required to provide Adam with a weekly written report detailing every milestone or development in Krishna’s life, including details about her diet and her daily activities. There were times I was, to be sure, way more descriptive than I needed to be. I liked writing about her, and tried to channel something born of strife into something positive: a journal of sorts Krishna could one day read of her early life.

  June 18, 2010

  KT spent this week in sunny California and had a ball. She was reunited with her grandmother and was very excited to see her again and listen to their personal made-up songs about fruit pies. She enjoyed hanging out at the pool but we were careful not to give her too much sun exposure as she is still too young even for sunblock. She has developed a light green ring around the pupils of her eyes so her baby blues may indeed be changing. Her eyebrows are also growing in and in spite of her fair hair is starting to look strikingly more Asian. She grows ever more beautiful and willful. She is enjoying herself.