Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 19

  A few days later, I went to Sotheby’s to meet with Rob. Because I felt duped about the nature of my first meal with Teddy, before I headed to Sotheby’s I called Rick and read him the riot act over the phone. He insisted he had not sent me to the dinner for anything other than business reasons. I felt further reassured knowing there would be several people from Teddy’s office at Sotheby’s with him. I’d been to the great auction house once before with an art-dealer friend. We’d sat on folding chairs shoulder to shoulder with other dealers and spectators, watching paddles rise and fall. It was exhilarating, the slides of the great works up for sale flashing on the screen behind the podium, the auctioneer calling out the vast sums of money. I never did think to look up, above the action on the floor. But on the day I went with my assistant to meet Teddy and Rob I discovered that above the auction pit there are boxes where heavy hitters look on in privacy—people who make the strivers downstairs seem like commoners. When I arrived, Teddy was observing an auction for one of his Modigliani paintings.

  “Come on, Junior,” he joked many months later, “you were turned on by all that.”

  “Not at all,” I said, doing my best impression of a wealthy dowager. “A man is much more attractive when he’s acquiring than when he’s unloading.”

  The truth is that Teddy mesmerized me. I felt drawn, not romantically but almost anthropologically, to his presence. His success, mysterious to me in its particulars until later, provided an intriguing subtext to every sentence and every gesture, however banal. Sitting in that box with Teddy, Rob, and a gaggle of their colleagues, I felt like I was watching Muhammad Ali have brunch. At Il Cantinori, Teddy had given me his full attention. Here, he was still a gentleman and unfailingly polite, but he handed me off to Rob with a mere sentence, something like “Rob, this young lady’s got some big ideas. And a book about Indians in America.” Rob took it from there. I tried to explain why a book of short stories on immigrant Indians in the U.S. would make a great movie. But it was hard to be articulate in that atmosphere. Teddy, meanwhile, was busy offloading a couple of Modigliani paintings! I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. Who was this strange creature in black tasseled loafers?

  I mentioned to Teddy that I was soon headed to L.A. to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day. How funny, he said. He would be heading to L.A. at the same time. “Would you like a ride?” he said, the way I might have proposed driving a friend upstate. I stared at him blankly, trying to figure out what the heck he meant. “On my plane,” he added, sensing my cluelessness. I’d already bought my ticket, but I couldn’t turn down a trip (my first ever) on a private jet.

  Days later, I found myself at a heliport on the eastern reaches of Manhattan. The helicopter took us to Morristown Airport. When we landed, we exited the helicopter directly onto the small runway, then from there we boarded Teddy’s Gulfstream V, a gift from the private-jet maker for buying, then reviving, the failing company in the mid-nineties. Just walked right up a small staircase and into the plane. No lines, no security, no taking off my shoes. It was exciting. I felt like a child getting on a roller coaster. Inside, instead of the rows of seats I somehow still expected to see, I saw what looked like a cozy living room outfitted with four big chairs facing each other, a small long bar with two crystal bottles of brandy and magazines, and a dining table with plush banquettes that seated four across from the bar. There were three flat-screen TVs total. Toward the back of the plane was another seating area—not the fully reclining seats some airlines sell to first-classers, but two couches that could each seat three and could collapse to become a proper bed, queen-size and plush. As Teddy got settled, I tried to play it cool. He had an apartment that could fly. I couldn’t help thinking about my mom’s first apartment on East Eighty-Third Street. The plane’s cabin seemed about the same size.

  Over thirty years had passed since I’d lived in that apartment, since I had first arrived in New York from India, which now felt more like several lifetimes distant. That flight from Delhi to John F. Kennedy Airport, which had been my first, had brought its own kind of wonder. I had been just four years old when my grandparents had put me on a plane, alone, to cross several oceans and continents. A journey that would reunite me with my mother, whom I had seen just once in two years.

  When my grandfather left me at the Delhi airport that October morning, I had on shoes, not a typical feature of my wardrobe at the time, and a bright-red wool coat with a hood and a big bow just below the collar. I had never needed a heavy coat before. My grandfather, however, had been to America and knew true winter. Fastened to the inside of my coat was a glassine envelope containing a slip of paper with the address of my grandparents’ house in Delhi—a sort of return address for me, a little red and brown package. Their phone number and my mother’s information were also listed. I can still hear my grandfather reciting the phone number aloud, saying “naught” for “zero,” prompting me to repeat after him. I was excited. I didn’t understand where I was going or how long my trip would take. But I knew I’d see my mother again.

  I flew Air India. The trip—the local-bus equivalent of air travel—took me from Delhi to Cairo, Cairo to Rome, Rome to London, and finally London to New York. I loved every minute of it. The plane’s interior was baby blue and the stewardesses—the supermodels of the seventies—were impossibly glamorous, wearing large bindis, bouffant hairdos, and printed silk saris. They strode the jetliner’s aisles, calling out, “Coffee, tea, juice!” in their poshly accented English. Between flights, I watched their saris flutter as they walked briskly down the jetways, each woman carrying a pink Samsonite beauty case.

  I sat near the front of the planes, with the other kids flying solo. The stewardesses plied us with coloring books and little paper puppets of the airline’s mascot, a mustachioed maharajah wearing a red Nehru jacket. One older girl who made the trip with me through many planes and airport gates wore plaits in her hair, bottle-cap glasses, and a yellow plaid dress with a ruffle at the bottom and a bow at her back—very Holly Hobbie. Her trip was traumatic. At the gate in Heathrow, I watched her throw up on the back of her chair, staring as the vomit cascaded down the polyurethane. I wasn’t nauseous. I spent my trip marching up and down the plane aisles. I was excited to be flying in the sky, gazing at downy clouds outside my airplane window. I felt elated to be on my way to America, and to be reunited with that most glamorous and elusive member of my family, my mother.

  I didn’t know then, of course, that the crossing from New Delhi to New York was more than a crossing of oceans and continents; it was a crossing of cultures, of lifestyles, of ways of being and knowing. I would be debarking in a New World. I would never be fully at home in India again or ever fully at home in America. I couldn’t have looked back, even if I had thought to.

  As Teddy’s plane rumbled into the sky and we settled into our chairs, the disparity between the lives we both had led really struck me. I had a sudden and strange realization: besides the pilot and two attendants, we were the only ones aboard. On that first trip with Teddy, the unspoken agreement of the commercial plane ride—talk minimally to your seatmates, if at all—did not apply. So our flight felt a bit like a road trip, just the two of us looking for ways to pass the six hours it took to reach LAX. We made a game of our conversation. We decided to go back and forth, sharing a story from each year of our lives. I began with my mother’s first divorce and my decampment, my first flight, and our reunion on Halloween night. I told him of moving back to India a few years later, leaving out the most personal details, and then returning to New York. I told him about moving to L.A., modeling in Europe, and my forays in TV.

  I found myself, for the first time in a long while, recounting my life to someone far removed from it. He was not part of my ever-overlapping worlds of fashion, food, or TV (as many of my friends were). He wasn’t a writer, editor, or publisher (as many of Salman’s friends were). He was unaffected by the Kool-Aid I had so eagerly drunk. I felt liberated of the self-seriousness that oc
casionally afflicted my industry’s tales of TV shoots and casting calls. And unlike the Bombay-born Salman, Teddy had grown up in Connecticut. He listened to my Chennai stories with particular curiosity. I saw the strangeness of my peripatetic childhood and young adulthood reflected in his face.

  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 nam
e 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.