Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 2

  Salman wanted to see me once more that week before I went back to L.A. Again, he asked me to lunch, and again, I should have said no. This time, however, lunch seemed like the best option. Meeting in a public place meant we couldn’t even hold hands. We met at Balthazar, the old-world SoHo brasserie, which in the late nineties was all the rage. Propriety be damned. My twenty-ninth birthday was approaching, and he handed me a copy of his latest book, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. On the title page, he had crossed out “her” and written “your,” and signed it, “Love, Salman.” As if this were not enough, he asked me what I would like as a present. As long as it wasn’t a Maserati, he’d be happy to oblige. I’d known him then for less than thirty days. I searched my mind for something appropriate—it couldn’t scream “mistress,” and I couldn’t exactly ask Salman Rushdie for a CD player. So I asked for a story. Sure, he said, he could easily dig up an unpublished piece in a drawer somewhere. No, I said, an original story. Something you write for me. The story synopsis that he wrote for Random House, and faxed to me, would eventually become The Enchantress of Florence, his ninth novel, finally published a year after our divorce.

  Just three weeks had gone by since I’d first met him fleetingly on Liberty Island. We had indeed only been in each other’s actual presence thrice. Yet I could no longer imagine a life without this man in it. I didn’t know what had hit me. It was like living in a landlocked place all your life, and then one day seeing the ocean. And swimming in it. I had opened a door I didn’t know existed. My heart leapt every time the phone rang. My heart began to sink every time a few hours went by and it didn’t ring. Salman was a great talker. He could speak knowledgeably about anything, one minute enlightening you on an obscure eastern European author, then in the next moment speaking with fluency on Mexican music. He could use baseball stats to drive home a point about history. Even when I went out with friends in Los Angeles, or feigned interest in the dates I was still going on (what elaborate lengths we go to fool ourselves), the best part of the evening would be coming home and telling him all about it just as he woke in London. He could be erudite and serious. But he could also be sardonic. He was an equal-opportunity derider, poking fun at everything from poetry to pop culture. He often joked about poets, “Their words don’t even go to the end of the page.” I felt lofty by association, which buoyed my shaky confidence. I had achieved some measure of success in my industry in Europe, yes, but I was one of the only people in my family without a graduate degree. I had always felt conflicted about my work, at once proud of how far I had come and eager to prove that I had more to offer than a nice silhouette. I saw in him, even if I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, the pathway to a life full of learning and growing.

  Our relationship continued over the phone for several more weeks and I continued my life in L.A. as if nothing had changed. Only a year had passed since I’d moved back to the States after spending most of my twenties in Europe. My theater degree and lack of real job experience hung around my neck like a yoke. I had done two films in Italy, but I was hustling even to find an agent willing to take me on in Los Angeles. The book had done modestly well, and I soon got word it had won the 1999 Versailles World Cookbook Fair Award for Best First Book. They sent me a scrolled-up certificate with a very official gold seal on it. But no one knew or cared except my mother and my editor. My advance had long since been spent and it would be ages before I earned it out and saw any checks from book sales. It had been a few months since I’d published the book, and after the promotional tour, I returned to the slog of commercial castings and the loneliness of California, the isolation chamber of my mom’s ’86 Nissan Stanza. This was the same car I had learned to drive in at sixteen. Regardless of all I had seen and done, in college and abroad in Milan and Paris as a model, as an actress and TV host, I suddenly didn’t feel like I had come very far from those high school days. Los Angeles would have this effect on me until years and years later.

  That November Salman’s latest novel was to be published in French and he would be going to Paris to celebrate. “Come with me,” he said. “I’ll send you a ticket.” I had to say yes, yes to Paris, to an escape from L.A. And yes to him. I couldn’t refuse the adventure.

  I’ll admit I applied very little rational thought to the decision to go. I didn’t think of what accepting the invitation might mean. People are so strange, aren’t we? This man invited me to Paris. We’d spent so many nights baring our souls on the phone. We’d slept together once—months ago, but still. And yet I insisted that we stay in separate hotel rooms. God forbid a rendezvous in the City of Love with a married man have a whiff of impropriety.

  The trip lasted about four days and immediately introduced me to the realities of the fatwa. When I arrived at the hotel, Salman and I managed a brief hello before I was introduced to the officers assigned by the French government to his protection. The head of security in Paris was a stocky black man with a shaved head, who looked stern and terrifying until he smiled. He was a teddy bear and comforted me with his warm presence. “Je suis le Kojak negre,” he told me when I asked his name, flashing that disarming grin, and a lollipop! Just call me the black Kojak.

  There was an official dinner hosted by the English ambassador and a reading of Salman’s work by the French actress Marie-France Pisier. I met Salman’s publisher, Ivan Nabokov, Vladimir’s grandson. We even went to visit my old professor and mentor, Michael Spingler, who still lived in the same apartment on Rue d’Alésia where I had spent so many happy evenings with his family.

  Throughout the trip, my separate hotel room stayed empty except for my bags, my bedsheets unrumpled. But I suppose it was good to have it there in case the spell was broken somehow, now that we were actually in each other’s physical presence for more than a few hours at a time. Or, perhaps, what if his wife suddenly showed up? I was aware that I was involved in something indecent, otherwise why would I have asked for the room in the first place? I had become one of those women you read about and cannot imagine being. My morality and sense of right were eroded by the allure of this man’s ardor and attention. That I could burn one day for the sin of choosing adventure over decency did not deter me from running toward that adventure. I cannot remember a distinct moment when I made the decision to offer myself to this married man, a thing that until it happened would have been unthinkable to me. I suppose drowning my inhibitions in Scotch at the Mark Hotel in August had allowed me to break the glass of propriety, but now there was little will left in me to put a halt to things, to say no to the best thing that had ever happened to me. I still thought we’d soon go back to our separate and very different lives. But for those four days, I wanted to savor every second of my unexpected and fantastical jaunt, an adulterous Cinderella not wanting the clock to strike twelve.

  That December, I went back to India, as I almost always do over Christmas. At my grandmother’s house, between meals and temple visits, I gave myself a crash course in Rushdie. I couldn’t get enough. I read The Moor’s Last Sigh, set in Kerala, my family’s ancestral home; Midnight’s Children, a story of India’s independence told through a writer who is involved with a cook named Padma and another girl later known as Parvati (my middle name); Shame; and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I had read some of The Satanic Verses when I was young, and tried again. Every time he’d call, I’d recount what I’d just finished reading. It was great fun being able to ask the author to clarify or expand on any given page on any given day. I began to fall in love with his writing, too.

  Due in part to his presence in my life, I had begun to grow as a person. I spent the night of the millennial New Year at an orphanage in Chennai (née Madras), cooking for the children there and playing until we fell asleep before midnight. I suppose I had to find a way to cleanse my soul as well.

  On one of the first few times we spoke in the new year, Salman had an announcement. By phone he reported that he had asked his wife for a divorce. As hard as it might be to believe, this development was a shock to me. I don
’t know what I expected from our relationship, but I had not expected that. We had never discussed our future. We had never discussed the idea of his divorcing his wife. My reaction was a fully emulsified mixture of shock and guilt. I didn’t want to be responsible for breaking up a little boy’s family. I didn’t get it. We’d spent a total of less than two weeks together (if you added up New York, Paris, and a trip he made that winter to L.A.) and he was leaving his wife? I insisted he not divorce his wife on my account. He assured me again and again that the marriage had been over before we met. We decided to keep things between us as they were, to not make any sudden moves.

  But my intentions and worries proved no match for my affection. I still scurried to the phone when I thought a call was from him. I was young, starstruck, and lovestruck, and after a few months, we started making plans. I spent time traveling to and from L.A. and Salman went to his usual award ceremonies, symposiums, readings, and the like. I often came along. I joined him in Amsterdam for the Boekenbal, the ball that launched Dutch Book Week, when he was the first foreigner they ever honored. I still look at photos of that ball to remember the couple we once made: He in his tux and gray beard, which still had a streak of black near the chin. Me, in a sleeveless red gown and little diamond earrings, which I had bought years before during my early modeling days, my first-ever extravagant purchase. (“Seven hundred dollars!” my mother had yelped when I told her.) We looked so in love. Few people could spend time with us without feeling our charge.

  I was eager to leave L.A. and had wanted to move back to New York. He, too, loved the city, and so it was decided. We moved in together in the spring of 2000. We rented a gorgeous brownstone on the Upper West Side with four floors, including a grand dining room dominated by an ornately carved wooden fireplace. The dining room had a little bay window that looked onto the back garden. We sublet this place for six months. This was the house in which my husband would write Fury. Our landlords lived upstate on a farm that supplied many of the city’s finest restaurants. Every now and then, they’d send us a crate of vegetables—leeks and zucchini, carrots and tomatoes. I remember making a lot of ratatouille that summer.

  My American television career began to take off. In the course of my book tour for Easy Exotic, I’d appeared on the Food Network a couple of times, and that had led to a development deal the following spring just as soon as we had moved in together. I would join Melting Pot, a series that aired every day at the same hour, each episode featuring a different pair of tag-team chefs representing a particular world cuisine.

  There was Team Latino with Aarón Sánchez and Alex García. There was Team Mediterranean with Rocco DiSpirito and Michelle Bernstein. Michael Symon and another chef had the midweek eastern European slot. There was Caribbean cooking and soul food from the South. And then on Fridays there was me: Team, well, International Brown, I guess. The show was called Padma’s Passport. Oddly, I had no cohost. And of course, I wasn’t a chef, but a home cook. It was the first time—but far from the last—that I would feel completely out of my depth in the food world. Meanwhile, I still occasionally auditioned for parts in L.A. and New York. I played a bitchy, talentless pop singer named “Sylk” in Mariah Carey’s Glitter. I played a kidnapped princess on Star Trek: Enterprise. Nothing groundbreaking, but I was having fun and happy to be working.

  The next few years were, for the most part, blissful. I was in love. I soon was living in a beautiful house, which Salman bought and which I renovated. I trawled Simon’s Hardware for knobs and handles and hired contractors. We restored the brownstone from four apartments to its original glory as a Gilded Age single-family home. When we were together in New York, even before we moved out of our sublet, we had our daily routine. Salman typically woke before I did. He’d make me green tea with honey and buttered toast and sweetly set it on my bedside table. I’d go to the gym, shower, then go to auditions or jobs or sit at a stool in the kitchen with my laptop, cooking and reading in preparation for my show. I overthought the process, researching cardamom and rehearsing the dozens of facts I’d learned so I would be armed with enough things to say on camera. I was learning on the job and until then had only my experience on Italian television to go by. I’d do my own work until I knew Salman’s daily writing session was almost over, then I’d bound up the stairs to the third floor, where his office was, all the while thrilled that I lived in New York City. In a house. With a staircase.

  I’d poke my head into his office and find his lap. Occasionally, he’d show me drafts of his work—an article for The New Yorker, an op-ed for The Guardian—and I’d pore over each one, trying to impress him with my thoughtful feedback. He ultimately made it clear that anything but my gushing approval would be ignored. But I didn’t mind. He was the writer, after all.

  One summer, we were walking together in the middle of Central Park when it suddenly started to rain. The clouds spilled sheets of water on us, and we took shelter under a tree. I was tugging at his arm, trying to pull him back out into the downpour, because after growing up on Bollywood rain sequences, the notion seemed quite romantic to me. He wouldn’t budge, muttering about not wanting to turn his clothes into a soppy mess. I just laughed then. When you’re in love, such differences of opinion seem beguiling.

  At my most ardent, I sought to please and charm him, by preparing his favorite foods, decorating our home, looking my best, and telling him funny stories that I had rehearsed in my head on the way home to him. We had countless dinner parties for our friends, and I tried to create evenings that would please everyone, but particularly him. I loved hearing him hold forth from the head of the table, telling his layered stories as I flitted in and out of our kitchen barefoot. My feet throbbed as we lay in bed, satiated after those long evenings, reliving what funny things everyone had said and done as we fell asleep in each other’s arms. We had our own patois, a jumble of East and West, a language of love and humor for comparing notes on the world.

  Early on, I was both entranced and terror-stricken by his friends. I didn’t realize that authors, like basketball players, hung out together. His friends were literary giants like Susan Sontag, Peter Carey, and Don DeLillo. Dropped in the middle of these people, I was unsure of myself and daunted by what he had said about them. I loved talking about books, but I was in constant fear that my English-lit-class knowledge would extinguish itself midsentence. And so I would sometimes retreat to the kitchen, where I could relish our guests and their stories from a safe distance. At the table, among others, were Don and his wife; Paul Auster and his second wife, Siri Hustvedt, herself an accomplished writer; their daughter, Sophie, barely a teenager; and Susan Sontag.

  My insecurity at meeting Salman’s friends revealed itself mostly in my cooking. My strategy for overcoming feelings of inferiority was to keep my hands busy, to cook and bring drinks and clear plates. For our first dinner party in our Upper West Side sublet, I planned a simple Indian menu. Our food is more regional than most Westerners realize, and I wanted to show the nuances of flavor from both my South Indian roots and Salman’s northern Kashmiri ancestry. I had perused a cookbook written years ago by Salman’s sister and noted that as kids they loved chicken—their father would complain about how much Salman and his sisters wanted to eat it all the time. The first four recipes all had yogurt in them. It was common for North Indian and especially Kashmiri dishes to have yogurt or cream, so I made a creamy chicken curry with mint from my first cookbook named after my uncle Chidambaram. The recipe called for a healthy dose of fiery dried red chilies, as well as garam masala, a North Indian spice blend of freshly dry-roasted and ground spices such as cinnamon, coriander seed, cardamom, and cumin.

  I wanted Salman to feel not just at home, but like he was back home, where we were from. It was how he made me feel. I could not be his first wife (or his second or third for that matter). Indeed, because of our age difference, I could not experience many of his firsts with him. But I could, with my cooking, take him back home, to a sweet, idyllic place and time, back
to those smells of childhood and India. I wanted him to feel that with me, he was finally home.

  I found a heavy cast-iron pan, heaved it up onto the stove, and began to roast the whole spices and chilies together. I tossed around the coriander seeds and cinnamon twigs, scraping the pan with my metal spatula as I raked them back and forth. My eyes began to burn and tear as the spices released their oils. The aroma of those spices I hoped would be carried upstairs to his workroom, where he sat writing. I ground them up in an old Vitamix and wondered if our landlords would ever get the smell out of the machine. I doubted the sweet patrician kitchen with eyelet curtains and Betty Crocker décor had ever been assaulted with such smells. I made a mental note to soak the inside of the flask with lemon juice.

  I made white beans with tomatoes and amchur, or dried green mango powder. The plump, round pink tomatoes here in the U.S. tasted bland and watery to me most of the year. I took to adding a pinch of palm sugar and green mango powder to duplicate the sweet and sour notes in the less good-looking but delicious tomatoes from back home. I used a whole stick of butter to fry the ginger and red onions in the wok, before adding the rest of the ingredients. There was a street-food stew we ate with fluffy white bread buns as children called pav bhaji. I remembered having it first in Pune when I went to visit my aunt Neela after her marriage. There would be a semicircle of scooters and motorcycles gathered around a man with a huge black iron griddle about three feet across. Here the various vegetables would be bubbling away with tomato and ginger, a ton of not ghee, but Amul butter. Whole bricks would be buried in the hot stew, which got darker and darker as night set in. The tangy mix of ginger and dried green mango, fat and spices, bathed the soft, buttery white beans in just enough heat.

  I made delicate lemon rice, common in our southern state of Tamil Nadu. Mustard seeds and curry leaves (sent from my mother’s garden in Los Angeles), fresh serrano chilies, and white gram lentils were fried in hot oil with turmeric and cashews. That hot oil was mixed into the rice with fresh lemon juice and kosher salt. The bright-yellow hue would look stunning at the table. And to cool things off, I made raita, a yogurt-and-cucumber relish.