Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (21 page)

He told me about his family, his childhood and coming-of-age, about how he’d supported himself with money he made playing bridge. He told me about his first job out of law school, as a prosecutor for homicide cases. We continued to trade stories until we reached year thirty-six, when I ran out of years. He had thirty more to go. I learned there was more to
Teddy than business deals. He told me about his friendship with Nelson Mandela, who had given him one of his prize possessions: a replica of the dish Mandela had eaten from inside his Robben Island prison cell, inscribed, “Best wishes to a precious and generous friend.” He told me about his sons Siya and Everest, South Africans who had been orphaned, and whom Teddy adopted and adored. He told me about the children’s charities he supported, leaving out information I’d later discover—that he had cofounded the Children’s Scholarship Fund, to which he had given $50 million and which had subsequently raised more than eight times that amount. Besides that, he also worked with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp and funded a couple of camps for kids with terminal illnesses. And he conducted an annual fund-raiser each summer for still other children’s charities. Most people—myself included, at first—did not realize how copious his philanthropy had been. He preferred to give in a way that did not involve his name on the sides of buildings. “I’ve got monogrammed towels and golf shirts for that,” he’d say.

Aside from the final hour of the flight, when Teddy began to excuse himself every ten minutes or so to make brief phone calls, we spent the entire trip talking. Later, he told me that what I thought were important calls to some CEO or board member were actually calls to his pilot, Tom Ritz. It turns out a Gulfstream V doesn’t really take six hours to get to L.A. from New York.

“Ritzy,” Teddy had asked Tom, “can you fly around the block a few times?”

“We’re running low on fuel,” Tom joked back. “Make your move already.”

I did not fall in love on that plane ride. There is a myth about love, that it happens in an instant; that there must be a spark that generates immediate
flames; that the flames must roar right away. When I met Teddy, I was in no emotional state to start a new relationship. I was still reeling from the free fall of my divorce. I had been as high on life as you could get—in love, happy with my career, confident as can be that it would all last forever—and then in no time, I was alone, nauseated and unsteady from the rapid descent. I approached Teddy with caution.

My divorce had highlighted the faults of my relationship blueprint. I was old enough by then to recognize that the principles that had guided my choice of men could have been pulled directly from the She Has Daddy Issues handbook. I never knew my father. Until my twenties I didn’t even know what he looked like.

I did have a doting grandfather, however. My beloved K. C. Krishnamurti, or Tha-Tha. For more than three decades, he worked as a civil hydro-engineer in the Indian government. During his heyday, in the late 1960s, he managed enough water to control a third of India’s power. He was so distinguished in his field that after a short tour surveying hydroelectric plants and dams in America and Canada, he was offered a much-higher post by the Canadian government. A devout Brahmin and vegetarian, he politely declined. He figured that as a manager, he’d be forced to entertain in his home and serve meat, which he was not prepared to do. Later in his life, when I pressed him, he admitted that he had also declined in order to spare his children yet another move. Despite his success, he was, like most government workers, squarely in the middle class at best.

He was born in Kerala in an enclave of Tam Brahms, slang for members of our Tamil ethnicity and our Brahmin caste. Our family home had long been up north, but when he retired at age sixty, in 1977, he moved the family back south to Chennai, the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and then called Madras. He felt, rightly, that his pension would go further down south. He would also be closer to his relatives, to the ocean,
and to the hub of
dosas,
the savory rice and lentil crepes made on iron griddles at the vegetarian tiffin halls near the Mylapore temple in Chennai. He often said, jokingly or not, that he wanted to die in the land of his forebears but still live in a city. So he arrived in Madras rather than Kerala, where he purchased the two-bedroom third-floor flat at A-7/5 in G.O.C.H. colony (Government Officers Colony Housing), in the neighborhood of Besant Nagar, where I would spend some of the most formative years of my life.

KCK had always wanted to practice law. His parents had nine children, so sending a son to law school was not in the financial cards for them. After a career as a hydro-engineer, he could handle the cost. So upon moving to Madras, at age sixty, he enrolled himself in Anna University to study law. After graduating first in his class, he worked as an apprentice to a younger advocate, and eventually took a case of his own, winning insurance money for a widow. He promptly retired from law and ran a tutorial out of our home in arts and letters as well as math and sciences. On Sundays, he tutored to any college students who couldn’t afford to pay. Everyone knew KCK’s flat in Besant Nagar. If you ever got lost going there, you needed only to walk to nearby Elliot’s Beach and ask one of the many young men leaning on their scooters and having a cool drink. KCK’s love of knowledge didn’t relent even during the last few years of his life. When I’d come to visit, I’d find him at his desk, behind a stack of books. “What are you doing, Tha-Tha?” I’d ask. “Working out some physics problems, Pads,” he’d reply. He wanted to keep his mind sharp.

Mornings of my Madras childhood smelled of steeping coffee, steaming tea, and sandalwood. I’d wake up to the sounds of my grandmother haggling with the vegetable vendor through the window and of water being splashed hard by the mugful on the cool marble tile of the bathroom. After bathing, my grandfather washed his own garments, wrung them dry, and hung them in the sun on a clothesline on the veranda. He
would anoint his body—once a decathlete’s but by then rotund, with a belly and a grand double chin—with stripes of sandalwood paste and
vibhuti
or holy ash, as would most Brahmin men. Then he’d comb back his receding salt-and-pepper hair with Brylcreem, Pat Riley–style. To this day, I cannot think of him without conjuring the combined smell of Brylcreem and sandalwood. While the women of the house chased after us to put on our uniforms and collect our books and tiffin boxes of hot curries and rice for school lunch, while we yanked on our shoes and socks and hightailed it downstairs before the bus stopped honking and left us in the heat and dust, he chanted his morning prayers and
slokas
on the veranda. Before the sun’s heat had reached full force, he’d set off on his daily morning constitutional accompanied by his carved walking stick and the other retired attorneys in the neighborhood.

Of all the people in our family, no two had a tighter bond than KCK and me. He doted on me endlessly, and among his three grandchildren, I was his pet—at least until Rohit, his first grandson, was born. After my mother left for America, he took it upon himself to prep me for our eventual reunion. To my four-year-old self, it felt like I was an astronaut getting ready for a trip to the moon. Tha-Tha was my mission control and the senior officer who had made that voyage and come back to tell about it. He had traveled to the U.S. numerous times and gave me as much information as he could about the gravity and air on this new planet called America. He spoke of tall skyscrapers and of something called the subway. He said that children played baseball, not cricket.

When I met new people, rather than stay silent and invisible, he taught me to say,
Hello
,
how are you doing today?
In 1970s India, people preferred children to be seen and not heard. America seemed to require a gregariousness that was not lauded in our culture. Truth be told, he loved America and relished pouring all his accumulated knowledge into his first grandchild. Tha-Tha made me memorize all fifty U.S. states alphabetically.
He made me memorize the name of Gerald Ford, the U.S. president. He taught me to sing “Ol’ Man River,” a 1920s ballad from the musical
Show Boat,
about a dockworker’s struggle against the great Mississippi River. He loved this song and sang it in a slow baritone, doing his best to approximate a black American’s southern accent. The song was a metaphor for struggling against the currents of the river of life, as experienced by an African American stevedore in the Jim Crow south. I wonder if he feared that my mother and I would never be accepted as equals there. Would we be discriminated against like the African Americans he read about? To his very Indian way of thinking, education was the best defense against this, so he would educate me as much as he could on the ways and mores of my adopted culture and hope that it in turn adopted me.

He told me stories of how he navigated American restaurant menus to feed his vegetarian stomach in the land of meatloaf and chicken casseroles. He described cooking for his hosts during a business trip and teaching them to make yogurt rice, of their incredulousness at the possibility of not starving to death on just lentils and rice. They seemed to think that this was the cause of India’s poverty, but he assured them that one could feed more people with the milk of a cow than with its flesh.

He spoke wistfully of buying hot coffee and a warm donut for fifty cents at lunch counters when there was nothing else he deemed suitable. He loved donuts. We had no Indian equivalent of a sweet that size. Soft and fluffy, filled with air and cottony starch, shellacked with a sweet white glaze or sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon dust, donuts were the thing he missed most. He talked of donuts reverently. Tha-Tha and his
sweet
tooth!

Tha-Tha focused a lot on the food in America. Food was, of course, central to his existence. You could tell by his big Santa Claus belly, which in those days I often slept on at night. But mealtime in the States was when he had struggled most. It was the one facet of American life he,
as a Brahmin man, a lacto-vegetarian, could not totally assimilate to or fully enjoy. He told me to be very careful when I ordered food outside my mother’s house because there was hidden meat lurking everywhere, even in harmless-seeming soups. You’d be ready to eat some gorgeous, shimmering-hot “vegetable soup” in the snowy Yankee winter, he’d warn me, and then just as you closed your mouth to swallow, you would sense a meaty odor in the broth, a dark, sinister flavor no God-fearing soul could consume. Even fruit pies or potato crisps, which I loved and ate by the handful, could be fried in the extracted and liquefied fat of an animal. They called it lard. I needed to keep to the side of the culinary road. I was warned to seek the safety of simple bread, butter, and cheese to sustain myself until I learned to decipher what was safe to eat. America was where anything could happen. A cowboy Wild West of freedom, vice, plenty, and charm, where the boundaries were different and much, much wider.

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.