Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (28 page)

Maryanne, my beloved friend and acupuncturist, came by to administer a treatment as we had planned and found me on the swing. She could not have been more pleased. She needled me on my green couch, the same one I had sat in when the fertility specialist told me my ovaries were older than I was, and then promptly sent me back to the swing. I was still swinging when Teddy arrived at my door. “There’s your favorite apple crumble pie warming in the oven,” I said. I didn’t want it to spoil if I got stuck in the hospital, so I’d decided to heat it up while I was swinging. There were enough of us around, so I ordered pizza from my favorite joint on Avenue B, too. “Junior, you are original in all you do.
Sui generis!
Jeez, how can you think of food right now? And will you get off that swing, you’re making me queasy.”

I went to the hospital that afternoon with my mother and Maryanne in the backseat, driven by Dr. Seckin himself. Teddy followed in his car. I
was pretty calm. I knew I wanted my mother there as well as Maryanne, so she could administer acupuncture for pain control (I wanted to be awake for the birth even if it was an emergency C-section) as well as to harvest my placenta and carry it out of the hospital safely. I wanted Teddy in the room for various reasons. One, I felt the most calm and safe when Teddy was around. And two, although he was squeamish, I knew he would be a wonderful partner. Teddy was always a great clutch player. That’s who you want near you when times get tough. Teddy had the heart of a firefighter. When others rushed away, he rushed in to save the day. I also wanted him to experience the birth hand in hand with me. He certainly deserved it. I felt it was one of the few things he had never had the chance to experience in his long and colorful life. I was more than happy to give him that experience. He didn’t disappoint. He was a rock. He was funny. He made me focus and be thankful that this moment had indeed come. The mere fact that he was still by my side gave me great strength.

My cousin Manu phoned Adam just about the time I went into labor, when Seckin decided it was not a fire drill but the real thing. The baby was coming. By coincidence, my cousin Vinod and his partner, Tim, were driving down from Albany for the weekend, so they were in town. I also had extra aunts in from India, who added to the number of relatives who would eventually show up at Lenox Hill. Later that day, at 5:59 p.m., Krishna was born. I remained awake for as long as it took to remove her from my belly. Dr. Seckin held her up. I remember thinking she looked like a long stalk of buttered white asparagus. He gave her to Teddy, who brought her to me.

Those first few hours were a groggy blur. The only thing I remember clearly is the moment Teddy brought Krishna to me. I thought my heart would burst with happiness. I remember staring into his face as he held my hand. In the moment just before we heard her cry, I looked up at him and said I was scared. “Of what, Junior? There’s nothing to be frightened of.” I said I didn’t know and he replied, “Just remember our life is about
her now.” What struck me at that moment was how this man could love me so resolutely, after everything. How he had said “our” and not “your” life. I burst into tears and laughter as I heard Krishna’s first cry. It sounded small, almost like a kitten mewling, nothing like those boisterous cries you hear from newborns in movies. Teddy took the baby out to my mother, who had been patiently waiting along with almost every other member of my family. Nine eager brown faces waited, all squished in the tiny waiting area for this long-bodied little pale face with squinty eyes and rosy cheeks.

I had purposely checked into the hospital under an assumed name. But the next day my publicist called me to let me know that she had received several inquiries from various press outlets and so she commented that the baby, named Krishna Thea, and I were both fine, as I had instructed her in advance to do if she was asked by more than three separate outlets. Apparently the news got out that I had given birth because Seckin had arrived late to a neighbor’s dinner party and apologized to the host, letting her know why. He thought he was having a private conversation, but an editor from
Food & Wine
magazine, also present, overheard and tweeted this sensitive information to the world. Poor old Seckin was mortified when I spoke with him about it afterward.

Adam flew in from Texas the day after Krishna was born. He saw and held the baby for the first time at Lenox Hill. He kept saying how “light” she was. At first I thought he meant her weight, but he meant the color of her skin. We were all expecting a brown-eyed, tawny-skinned little thing with jet-black Asian hair to appear and instead, out came this pale white baby with blue eyes and downy light-brown hair. Adam kept calling me the morning of the third day, agitating to come to the hospital again. I mistook it for enthusiasm, not anger. The night before, we had had a good visit. I even nursed the baby while he and his father remained in the room without asking them to leave. I asked him to come after Seckin examined me, which was to be in the late morning, so he could have an
uninterrupted visit. He kept calling to see if the doctor had been in. And I repeatedly said he hadn’t yet. Then Seckin finally did arrive, and he asked me to lift my gown and spread my legs so he could examine my stitches. The doctor had just put his gloves on and began to examine me when the door to my hospital room flung open without a knock. Adam and his dad started to walk in when Seckin, startled, raised his arm and asked them to wait outside. Seckin looked me in the eye for a really long time as if to say, “Are you all right?” Once my exam had finished, Adam and his dad entered again. Adam towered over my bed. His face was colored deep pink, and his ears seemed to be getting red. He asked me why I didn’t include his name in the announcement, and at first I had zero idea of what he was talking about. I was still quite out of it, feeling the effects of anesthesia and post-op sedation. I was exhausted from the birth. But I remember crying, and asking Adam not to yell at me. He exited the room several times, running to the nurses’ station, demanding to see the birth certificate. They told him the registrar, not anyone in the maternity ward, had it. He went down to the registrar’s office but they said they had sent it in to the county.

The papers, it turned out, had printed Krishna’s name as Krishna Thea Lakshmi. This enraged Adam. I did not know why this became such an alarming thing for him at that very moment. If indeed he became involved in Krishna’s life, we could always add his name. My birth certificate has my birth father’s surname, but no one even knew or cared. I took my mom’s last name, Lakshmi, because she was my primary caregiver. It seemed that Adam was focusing on marking territory, on symbolism with no substance.

He could not control his temper. In spite of his father and my mother trying to calm him down he could not lower his voice or speak normally to me. And this while the baby was in the room. In Indian culture, we believe that whatever you expose the child to in the first few weeks and months of life will have a profound effect on her. I was concerned that the
baby would absorb the negative energy coming from Adam. The atmosphere was horrible.

He kept pacing ominously back and forth in my tiny room, refusing to sit down. After a few hours of this, his father finally convinced him to leave and escorted him out. I was shaken to the core. I couldn’t believe that someone, let alone my baby’s very father, could behave that way mere hours after I had given birth. I had thought he would know that behaving in such a way was foolish and arrogant and totally inappropriate. Didn’t he know that this moment, this tender beginning for all of us, would now be sullied by his bullying?

We hadn’t even come to any final decisions on anything. Furthermore, why shouldn’t my last name be fine to give the baby? Millions of people around the world bear their father’s last name, and it didn’t mean that they loved their mother any less. So why was it so offensive that she just have mine? Was mine alone not good enough? This raised my feminist ire as well as my ancestral matriarchal streak. What did it matter what the papers said anyway? It all seemed to be, yet again, a focus on nothing of importance or depth at that moment. I hadn’t even publicly acknowledged who the father was, and had no plans to release such personal information, given that we had not reached any agreement. For the rest of my stay at Lenox Hill, I had hospital security escort my mom with the baby in her plexiglas gurney to another, empty hospital room so Krishna could visit with her father.

I was very worried I wouldn’t be able to nurse Krishna. After Adam’s blowup in the hospital, I spoke very few words to him. I wanted him nowhere near me. In those first days of Krishna’s life, my milk began to dry up after coming in fine for the first few feedings. I worried that the stress of the altercation in the hospital had caused it to diminish. Thankfully, it returned, but not ever to the level of those mothers who are lucky enough to be able to freeze or express it in advance.

T
he decision to consume my own
placenta was not an easy one. Sometime during my pregnancy Maryanne brought the issue up when I said how terrified I was of going back to work six weeks after giving birth. The schedule of filming
Top Chef
is quite grueling by any standards, but the nice part is that after working pretty much round the clock for a month and a half, I am pretty free except for filming the finale, which comes months later.

Still, days on the show, especially in the first half of a season, can last fifteen or sixteen hours. I had been bedridden for six weeks before the baby came and was told to stay in bed six weeks after to heal. I was now up at all hours and nursing as well. I was worried I would collapse from exhaustion once filming began. Combined with the long hours were the marathons of eating on the set. My digestive tract would take a beating and debilitate my energy further. Maryanne brought up the fact that many mothers ate the nutritious tissue of their placenta as a way to shore up their energy reserves. Eating the placenta fortified her clients’ health and stamina and generally aided in their getting up and running normally much faster. The primary benefit, however, was warding off postpartum depression, some
thing I feared more than fatigue. And I had had bouts of depression myself at various times in my life.

Maryanne had already filled out a lot of paperwork with the hospital ahead of time so she could minister to me in my room during the time of or just before my delivery. I wanted acupuncture for pain control as well as to calm my stress levels. We didn’t know how the delivery would go and I was adamant about staying awake for Krishna’s coming. So Maryanne had permission to be there. Once the baby came out safely, a nurse in the OR collected the expelled placenta, placed it in a white plastic container commonly used for organ transplants, and handed Maryanne my biological waste. Maryanne placed the container in a brown shopping bag, calmly walked directly out of the hospital, and caught a cab downtown to my showroom and test kitchen in Alphabet City.

There, she placed the placenta in the fridge and went to Kmart with my assistant, Tucker. They bought all new knives, cutting boards, baking sheets, a coffee grinder, a pot for boiling, and a strainer, as well as disposable gloves. The next day, after a lengthy process that led to powdered placenta, Maryanne and Tucker used a tiny funnel and many little gelatin capsules to parcel out small daily doses of my very life force. I left strict instructions for them to throw out every single utensil and pan afterward. I told no one outside of those involved what had taken place in our studio or what the content of my little pills was until many months later.

I didn’t really feel comfortable at the time about the project, but I would have done anything to defend myself against collapsing from stress and fatigue or succumbing to the postpartum depression I was so afraid would beset me. Given the ever-present white noise of the drama and tension surrounding visitation rights and questions of custody happening between me and Adam, as well as the media scrutiny into very private matters in my life, depression was a constant threat. So resorting to encapsulated cannibalism did not seem so sinister to me.

Now, a couple of years on, I’m quite proud of eating my placenta. Our own bodies can give us a lot. I felt self-reliant and earthy, but of course I had not been the one standing there at the stove watching my flesh boil. I was thankful I had trusted friends and colleagues who would do it for me. Later, many months after the pills ran out, I did suffer from severe depression and asked my doctors for all the peer-reviewed articles pertaining to research on taking antidepressants while breast-feeding. Since I did not find much, I chose to refrain from taking any. I would breast-feed for a year and eight months. Most of that time, it would be a struggle to collect enough milk to sustain Krishna. Another plan of attack was hatched for that. Pills and tinctures, of milk thistle, blessed thistle, fenugreek or fennel seed, and garlic boiled in milk; constant massage; and drinking three to four liters of water a day all played a part in coaxing my body to do its job.

The finale of the DC season filmed in Singapore when Krishna was almost six months old. That July, we packed up to go to Asia. I had never fed Krishna anything but my own milk or the occasional top-up with formula when I had problems making enough to satisfy her growing hunger. The lucky coincidence of being that close to India during this time meant that Krishna would be able to have her first food ceremony, or
annaprasanam,
in Chennai at Rajima’s house. When I had informed Neela that I thought Krishna would soon be ready to eat something solid (she had been drooling at me with big eyes every time I lifted spoon to mouth lately) and asked what I should give her first, she stopped me cold. “Vait, vait,
vait!!
You can’t just give her food on your own! Jima will kill you, this close to India especially?! You have to bring her here, we have to call the priests, and
then
you can give her some small bit of rice and
dal
, or
kichidi,
but no black pepper, of course, just some
jeera.
” What about my grandpa’s famous banana
payasam
? I was looking forward to Krishna tasting that.

Pongal,
or
kichidi,
as it’s called in the north, is a simple white rice and mung lentil porridge that is made with very little else but butter and cumin or a few peppercorns and peas. It may have a scant few other cut vegetables in it, but it is mostly supposed to be purposefully bland and comforting for when you are ill or have stomach problems. It can be served with plain yogurt on the side and perhaps some spicy condiment or pickle, but for the most part is a neutral and wholesome dish eaten by Indians all over the world. Our version of chicken soup, perhaps. In the last trimester of my pregnancy, when I became grounded and often suffered from extreme acidity, I began to eat copious amounts of the stuff. In my modernized version of the recipe, I inverted the proportions of rice to lentils, two cups of lentils for every cup of rice, instead of the other way around. I wanted to have the traditional Indian comfort food, but with more protein and less starch. I also substituted more flavorful orange
masoor
lentils for the
pale yellow
moong.
I added a heap of various vegetables, from shredded lacinato kale, chopped celery, and fennel bulb to julienned carrots and finely chopped cauliflower. I added freshly minced ginger and sautéed it with some diced shallots, too. This recipe, the most comforting one I know, also helped me lose the baby weight. I lived on bowls and bowls of it while nursing.

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?