Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 11
Unlike the other judges, who aren’t there for the beginning two acts of the show, I have to gorge during the appetizer portion of the Top Chef–episode meal: the Quickfire. We’re not a live show, but we sometimes function as one. We can’t reshoot and reshoot; juicy rib eye steaks turn into cold meat and congealing fat. So the reality of the Quickfire is virtually identical to the way it appears on TV. Contestants are given a challenge on the spot—make an amuse-bouche using only products found in a vending machine; reinvent the po’ boy sandwich—and forced to execute a dish without forethought or mise en place. The chefs must act on a combination of culinary instinct and creative impulse. Adrenaline shakes awake their true selves, and the food they produce reveals who they really are as cooks. I always come hungry. They deserve the full audience of my appetite. I stand with the episode’s special guest, typically an established and celebrated chef, in front of a contestant and her dish, we eat, then we walk out of the frame. The cameras do a two-step around us and we walk back into frame in front of another contestant. The process is rapid fire: Bite, bite, bite, pause, adopt inscrutable facial expression, spew a vague comment that gives nothing away, and repeat. After a while my stomach begins to feel like a restaurant Dumpster. It was this kind of experience that made me devise a drink I call Cranberry Drano. I came up with it to help cleanse my digestive pipes after all the gluttonous eating on the show. During production I am likely to consume three full glasses of this potion a day, scrunching up my face the whole time, due to its less-than-pleasurable taste. (In spite of the taste, it gets me through to the other side of filming.)
cranberry drano
Serves 1
½ cup organic unsweetened 100% cranberry juice
1 tablespoon clear fiber powder
1 packet Emergen-C, or other vitamin C powder
1 cup still-hot green tea brewed with 1 teaspoon honey
4 to 5 ice cubes
Vigorously mix the cranberry juice, fiber powder, Emergen-C, and green tea in a tall tumbler. Add ice cubes. Drink immediately.
During the Chicago season, the immoderation started with the very first Quickfire. The guest judge was Rocco DiSpirito. And this being Chicago, the contestants, all sixteen of them, were tasked with making deep-dish pizzas that showed off their culinary personalities. In other words, the already brawny deep-dishes were decked out with prosciutto and lamb sausage and duck, with oozy Taleggio and cream-filled burrata. In the interest of fairness, Rocco and I had to sample each one straight from the oven, then again later to see how it held up to delivery. Do the math: thirty-two tastes, several bites in each. And you can’t take a small bite of deep-dish pizza—you cut off a bite with short length and width, but the height is fixed at, well, deep. I was in physical pain, devastated by my fullness.
By the filming of the second episode of the Chicago season, Darshan, my wardrobe diva at the time, noticed that my dress was tight. By the time the Chicago season wrapped, I had gained seventeen pounds. I felt horrible that I couldn’t manage my job and my appearance. My divorce had just become final; I was living in hotels and had little control over what I ate even when I wasn’t filming. That July, when I first moved into the Surrey, I had had the opposite problem. People wondered if I was possibly anorexic, because I couldn’t eat from depression and was so thin. Mere months later, in November, after my divorce became final and I had filmed another season of Top Chef, I ballooned up two dress sizes. Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss. I’ve also come to realize that as a fortysomething woman on TV, I’m a rapidly depreciating asset, like a car just driven off the lot. Then there’s the added indignity of seeing my flaws dissected, zoomed in on, and gleefully mocked.
I’ve come to accept my weight gain as part of my Top Chef pact with the devil. But early on, I was in denial. To make sure we came in under budget, I used to suggest that we borrow clothes from designers. This is a common strategy for models and actresses, which gives onlookers the impression that they have bottomless closets. My stylist had to break it to me: to fit into clothes available for borrowing, I had to be a sample size—in other words, waiflike. I wasn’t. By now, everyone on the set is used to my fluctuations. My beauty crew always finds a way to patch me up. From the start, Darshan would gather dresses in several sizes. She knew I’d jump up two or three sizes during filming. That, along with the magic of the camera—careful angling and long shots—helps hide the inevitable stomach paunch and back-of-the-arm pudge that always appear a few weeks in.
When I wasn’t filming, I could control my weight fairly well through good eating habits and exercise, thanks to both a forgiving metabolism and a flexible schedule. What I could never control, however, was my skin. I hated the fact that my dark skin marked and mottled easily—from my mosquito bite–scarred legs, to the two pale circles on my left arm from the olden days of inoculations in India, to the scar on my right arm. I didn’t love that my coloring set off the stretch marks behind my knees, which appeared during a teenage growth spurt, or those on my backside acquired from my many weight fluctuations. Various cuts and burns from cooking still remained, too, faded but nonetheless a reminder of every time I made some mistake. Every injury or physical skirmish left its mark on the landscape of my body.
Yet what I truly disliked, in certain gloomy moments and not always consciously, was my skin color itself, of which all that other piffle was merely a reminder. The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. The prizing of lighter skin did not reach our shores with colonialism, either, for there is much reference to the virtues of fair skin in ancient Indian texts. The logic of the-lighter-the-better comforts you until suddenly you are the darker one. Our attitudes toward skin color are manifold and nuanced and even contradictory. Kids who did not think twice about calling me “blackie” in high school were still quite capable of smearing suntan oil on themselves and lying out for incessant hours to get a tan.
When I came to the U.S., of course, I saw people in many shades. It was strange and wonderful to see Chinese and Caucasian and Dominican people all riding the same subway. I was fascinated by all the different types of people, not only by their skin colors and hair textures but also by the many different ways in which they dressed and expressed themselves. It was exciting to be a kid in New York City. Over time, I started to realize, however, that certain groups of people were viewed differently than others. It was confusing. The discrimination and racism faced by African Americans was obvious to me, even as a young child. I wasn’t black, but my own brown skin seemed to come with stories I hadn’t written myself. During the next decade and a half, I’d gradually learn that to many Americans, my skin color signaled third-world slums as seen in Indiana Jones movies, malaria, hot curry and “stinky” food, and strange bright clothing—a caricature of India and Indians. I began to change in
to a person who contained two people within herself: a girl proud of and connected to her culture and native country, and one who wished she just looked like her old doll, Helen. By high school, when fitting in seems almost as important as breathing, that second girl began to take control. When I changed my name—from Padma to Angelique—for approximately four wince-worthy years, I was trying to hide from my identity. That would come later, once we had moved to California, but my divided self began to split in New York, after the second reunion with my mother.
When I returned to finish fourth grade at PS 158, I joined my mother in Manhattan at 504 East Eighty-First Street, down the street from Mr. Chip’s Coffee Shop and Touch of Class cleaners, just two blocks from where we had started our life in America. I had a ball going to import stores like Azuma in the Village to decorate our new bachelorette pad—a studio apartment we divided with a yellow curtain to hide our bed. My mother’s heart must have been broken and aching at her second failed marriage, but she did not stop whatever activity was in progress to show it.
My mother had a way of making every task a more elaborate happening than it needed to be. She loved the ritual of things. Far from her own culture, and ripped away time and again from her family, she ardently made every shopping trip an excursion, every grocery run a treasure hunt, every unexpected visit by a family member an impromptu dinner party. She had the charming but exhausting habit of conceiving and cooking literally a dozen different dishes for each of these visits, all out of her tiny kitchen with no window. Our friends and family took to dropping in on us without warning so as to not impose on the already tiring schedule of a single mom working by day and studying for a graduate degree by night. I don’t know when Mother found the hours to do all of it, but she did, willingly, and with a smile. She relished planning a menu in bed late the night before a gathering. I thought she was talking to me, but mostly she was talking aloud to herself about what spices she would use, concocting new chutneys in her head, rehearsing new experiments using funny American ingredients like Cream of Wheat or pasta shells with South Asian spices and vegetables. She sniffed out rare Asian flora like fresh coriander and sugarcane, not at all found easily on the northeastern coast of America in the late 1970s. The experiments were always wildly pungent, and mostly all delicious.
Our neighbors, stay-at-home mothers from down the hall, often offered me bologna and cheese sandwiches with something like misty, righteous pity glimmering in their eyes.
But I loved my mother’s cooking. I didn’t eat ham yet or whatever that mystery meat was. And I liked watching her—not only in the kitchen. She was incredibly glamorous. Once she shed her nurse’s uniform, she was liberated and instantly transformed. She got dressed to go out, spraying Norell perfume into her décolletage, trying to obscure the lingering aroma of cumin left in her cleavage from cooking my dinner. She wore heavy eye makeup with robin’s egg–blue eye shadow, rouge, and bright lipstick, the whole nine yards in the brightest colors. She had taken makeup lessons from an aging, striking Swedish model who ran them out of her home. I watched The Dukes of Hazzard with the model’s son in his bedroom while out in their living room, the women practiced on each other. I still remember the view over the city from their high-rise apartment. Our only windows looked out onto another building’s wall.
I couldn’t wait for her to leave after those nights of self-adornment, so I could climb onto the sink, open the medicine cabinet, and use all the tempting colors with abandon on my own face. Like a harlequin at the circus, I drew big, deep semicircles for eyebrows, coloring under them with the blue eye shadow. I often fell asleep like that, streaking the sheets with her grease paint. She never got mad, though, not once.
My mother even paid me to do chores and groom her. I got five dollars for plucking her eyebrows, a raise from my starting pay of three dollars, and I got a buck for vacuuming, since our place was quite small. I would buy vegetables at Finest grocery store on York on my way home from school, and I could make an extra couple of bucks if I washed the produce and broke off the ends of beans. I don’t know how she afforded to live in the city on her nurse’s salary and do all the things we miraculously did.
After a year in our cozy little studio, when my mom finally disentangled herself legally from V., we moved to California. Another new beginning. My mother tried to convince me I’d be happier in our new apartment, where, for the first time in my life, I would have my own room. I would even have my own shelf in the kitchen for my beloved Pringles. I was angry at her for moving us out of New York, however, and never really forgave her until I was well into my twenties, shelf of Pringles notwithstanding. My mother must have been tired. Her feet and heart must have ached from the tap dancing and rebuilding and continual starting over. She hated the New York winters. A little girl is a wonderful source of joy and love, and even comfort, to any mother. But I look back now and realize how lonely she must have been. How alone without any support, or anyone to talk to, in bed or elsewhere, other than me. We were extremely close, but as a child I had no sense of what she might have needed as an adult.
When we first arrived, we spent the summer in the city of Orange, near Disneyland, on the pullout couch in my uncle Bharat’s family room. After that we moved to a two-bedroom rental in Arcadia, about fifteen miles northeast of L.A. Every day, my mom rode the bus for twenty minutes from Arcadia to City of Hope, the hospital where she worked. She hadn’t yet learned to drive.
While the apartment itself felt almost palatial compared with our studio on the Upper East Side, I was put off by the calm and quiet of my new home. I had always lived in a metropolis. First it was Delhi, then Chennai, then New York. Now I felt burdened by the lack of bustle, the empty sidewalks, and the looming San Gabriel Mountains. I missed Gracie Mansion and the East River, which to me at the time had the romance of the Seine. In New York, I had had a measure of real independence. If I was hungry, I could stroll down the block and get a bagel and cream cheese at the Jewish deli. I could grab an after-school slice and a soda (for one dollar!) at the pizzeria. I could roller-skate, alone, the eleven blocks south to Sloan Kettering and meet my mother at work. I felt like a person, albeit a small one. In Arcadia, however, I felt like a kid. I had to rely on my mom for almost everything.
And Arcadia was strange and foreign to me in another, equally isolating way: it was populated mostly by white people and a small smattering of Asians—Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos. Other than my mother and my reflection in the mirror, I effectively saw just one other Indian: my uncle. He was married to my aunt Trudy, a Swiss woman, so their kids, Sheila and Ashok, were half Indian, half Swiss ethnically, but were otherwise pretty much brown-skinned American kids from Orange County, California. They did not identify with many things in Indian culture and only went to India once every few years. But because they were used to frequent visits from strange relatives of their father’s from back home, they were incredibly nice and welcoming. My cousin Ashok was a year older than me, and his sister, Sheila, six years younger. But the three of us were close and played well together. At some point, my mother befriended a Gujarati couple, the Mishras. Pratima Mishra was an expert at assimilating non-Indian ingredients into her cooking. Often, she would deep-fry whatever she found (flour tortillas cut into triangles, say) and serve it with chutney.
India, of course, was a sea of brown faces. And in New York, Indians had been everywhere, from the subcontinenters who colonized our Elmhurst apartment building, to the cab drivers who knew the quickest way to get anywhere in the city, to the doctors who worked with my mom at Sloan Kettering, to the hot dog vendors who had sold us our hot-dog-less dogs. In New York I even heard many Indian languages spoken, including Tamil. I never felt like an outsider. Or at least when I did, I knew I was in the company of many, many other outsiders. On the walk to school, whether it was in Elmhurst or on York Avenue in Manhattan, I’d pass Filipinos and Peruvians, Barbadians and Chinese, Puerto Ricans and African Americans and Middle Easterners. Even some of the white faces I
saw were minorities, I learned, because they were Polish or had menorahs instead of Christmas trees. We were different from one another—we spoke different languages, ate different foods, went home to see our families in different far-flung countries—but we were alike in our differences. In that respect, New York City didn’t feel that much different from India. Just as Chennai and Delhi included people from all over India with different languages, religions, and cultures, so, too, did New York, where everyone seemed united by place and shared purpose, different from one another but part of a larger sameness.
California, and especially the greater Los Angeles area, is incredibly diverse, but the vast sprawl meant that the great pockets of Mexican and Chinese and African American inhabitants, at least from my vantage point, stayed separate. In high school, I observed this in microcosm. The Filipinos hung out together. So did the Mexicans. At school, kids didn’t know what to make of me. They were confused that I didn’t speak Spanish. “But you look Mexican,” they’d say. The types of insults and treatment I got used to in elementary school came fast and furious here, too, though they were less creative than “Black Giraffe.” I was taller and ganglier than most kids in my fifth-grade class. At age ten, being tall seemed intentional, like an affront. You could almost see the contempt on the other kids’ faces. Who does she think she is, taking up all that space? My vocabulary—nothing special, but distasteful to those who felt that trying at school was an offense almost as grave as being tall—led the kids to call me “Dictionary” behind my back. Becky liked to yank my hair from behind me in English class. David stuck to giving me flat tires by stepping on my heels as we walked to class, making me struggle to get my shoes back on, and frequently called me the N-word in my sixth-grade class. I got egged in seventh grade on the last day of school. I was punched by a girl in the face; then an egg was smashed on top of my head. I remember banging on Mr. Piela’s classroom door, dripping with yolk and gooey ooze all in my hair, pleading for him to let me in. I was bullied and humiliated and relieved that school was over and we were moving. We only lived a couple of years in the mostly white enclave of Arcadia, then moved to a more working-class neighborhood in another part of the Valley where my mom and her boyfriend could afford to buy a house. In eighth grade at Sierra Vista Junior High, in La Puente, I became perhaps the world’s least popular cheerleader. I suspect that the teachers, who liked me because I worked hard, ensured that I made the squad. The rest of the girls definitely did not approve. For the first time in my life, even after a childhood spent shuttling between New York and India, I felt foreign. I felt like I didn’t belong.