Love, Loss, and What We Ate Read online

  Top Chef both made me happy and taught me much, but I was itching to do something creative in addition to my TV work, to explore other facets of my interests. A few random people had seen the pieces I wore and asked where to find them. Slowly, I also had girlfriends and other TV personalities ask whether they could borrow them. With a bit of money left over from my Pantene contract, I designed a small collection of samples to add to what I already wore on the show, with Tara as my technical hands.

  Now emboldened but largely ignorant of how to run a business, I somehow thought we could start a company, basically out of my kitchen sink. At the time, I had a spunky and sweet assistant named Shayna, who was a talented photographer and wonderfully creative. She shot the samples for our look book and other materials, and we called the company the Padma Collection. The three of us worked together elbow to elbow out of my tiny writing room, until I rented out the place on the sixth floor above my apartment as an office. It was getting pretty cramped in my writing room with all our raw materials, molds, and computers; Tara’s tools; and Shayna’s camera equipment. The upstairs apartment served not only as an office, but as a beautiful showroom, too, and the big open kitchen it had was perfect for testing recipes. The showroom was also a good meeting place for the foundation’s board, as up until then we’d been meeting in Seckin’s waiting room.

  With all that was going on, I got it into my head that we should have the new office blessed, as I had done for every place I had ever lived, except my marital home. My ex-husband was a staunch fundamentalist atheist and had no patience for worshipping God in any form. I am pretty secular but didn’t mind hedging my bets. I called a couple of priests from my temple and they came in from Queens to bless our new space. They brought fresh mango leaves, coconuts, and various idols and camphor to burn during the puja.

  My cousin Rajni and her husband came to the blessing, with their infant son, Sidhanth, dressed in traditional clothing, looking every bit the perfect little Brahmin boy, with the customary horizontal three lines of vibhuti smeared across his forehead. It was wonderful to see young, hipster Shayna sitting cross-legged next to the veshtied priests as they chanted in Sanskrit on the rooftop of our Alphabet City digs. It was moving to share a deeper part of my own heritage with Tara, who had been one of the people who had quietly helped me pack up to move into the Surrey just two years earlier, when I was too weak from surgery to do so myself. I watched the smiling face of Michelle, my makeup artist, with pleasure as I bounced and held my nephew in my arms. Michelle had been and would be with me through so many seasons of Top Chef, by my side for the most challenging days, like in Las Vegas when I almost threw up on camera from the heat, crippling menstrual cramps, and too much food for one person to consume. She had patched up my streaming eyes when I could not stop crying behind the set’s kitchen door, because of how much I still missed Salman.

  Through the smoky haze of incense, I watched my cousin Rajni instinctively rise and bend to get whatever the priests needed at exactly the right moment, in a way that I could not, because I had left India before I could properly learn the technicalities of such rituals. She stepped in gracefully and silently and made everything so seamless as her sari rustled about her. Like Neela, Rajni had always been more of a sister to me. She has been there for almost every milestone of my life, observing and playing her part in the hierarchy of our family. Her life had been so different from mine. She and her husband, Ananth, whom we had all known since we were kids, had lived in the old neighborhood since childhood, until moving to the States as adults just a few years before. I could not help thinking about how differently my life might have turned out if my parents, like hers, had had a happy marriage. Who would I have become if my mother and I had never immigrated to the States? My work in food, fashion, and jewelry was definitely a result of all my travels, of the commingling of cultural influences I got to experience because I’d always had one foot in the East and one foot in the West. At that moment, I gave thanks for all the circumstances of my life that brought me there, to that very place in the East Village. I was happy in our treehouse workshop with friends, family, and worker bees around me.

  It felt good to hear Sanskrit echo in that office. And it comforted me to bring the various aspects of my current life together with the deepest spiritual origins of where I had come from. Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized. Not since I had left the comfort of my home and marriage had I felt a cohesiveness of being, a joining of my two very real identities. In that moment, finally, my American self and my Indian self were totally at peace as one.

  chapter 12

  Those first six months of 2009 were so busy, so productive, that time seemed to move faster than usual, and so I didn’t notice at first when my period was late. I could hardly keep track of what day it was already. Like so many women, I had spent my entire sexual life trying not to get pregnant. My mother had always reminded me of her exceptional fertility (she had only one child, but my conception had been on the first try). It could be hereditary, she’d warn me. Be careful. And so I had been. But that had been before the fertility specialist’s frank appraisal of my reproductive equipment. And though his conclusion had devastated me, it had also freed me from the worry of using birth control. Small consolation, but some nonetheless. For the previous six months, I had been less careful than I’d been in the past—I had been pretty much told there was no way I could conceive, after all. At least, not “the old-fashioned way.”

  But I was late. And despite the endo, I had always been regular—like clockwork. Was it possible? Could I be pregnant? I called Dr. Seckin. He sighed, sweetly, and told me to come in for a sonogram. Lying there, my stomach coated in jelly, I stared at the screen showing a hazy image of my uterus. I watched him whack the side of the monitor with his palm, as you would an old TV. “See this area?” he said, pointing. “If you were pregnant, you’d see a black spot right here.” I saw nothing. I joked that maybe I had a hysterical pregnancy. “Not hysterical,” he said. “Wishful.”

  Another week and no period, yet strangely, I had many of its symptoms: I felt tired. I was ravenous. My boobs were sore and swollen. Confused, I called my friend Sharon, who had told me her early pregnancy symptoms mimicked those of her period. I thought about calling my mother, but worried that she’d be too emotional. I needed someone who could maintain a clinical reserve. So I called my aunt Premi, a psychiatrist, who urged me to get a blood test to be sure. I finally gave in and asked my mom about her pregnancy. “Paddy, I can’t remember,” she told me. “That was forty years ago!” Thanks for the reminder, Mom. I called Seckin’s office again. He was away in Iceland at a conference. I filled in Kim from his office, who told me to come in for a blood test and added an excited “I’m so happy you’re trying!” But I wasn’t trying.

  Several fretful days after the blood test, I got a call from a strange number. I was in a rush as usual—my hair sopping wet, late for an interview with TV Guide and afterward lunch with the editor in chief. I picked up the call. It was Seckin, calling from Iceland. “Padma, you must come here,” he said, the bad reception thickening his charming Turkish accent. “It’s like being on another planet!”

  “Is that why you’re calling?” I asked. “To tell me about Iceland?”

  “Padma, I’m standing on a glacier, in the full glory of Mother Nature.” I knew then. By this point, I had known Seckin for years. I was well acquainted with the genuine sense of amazement that medicine and the human body inspired in him, even after decades of practice. I knew he wouldn’t tell me this news from inside his hotel room. He had wanted to be in a miraculous place when he told me of my own miracle.

  Seckin forbade me from telling anyone yet. The risk of miscarriage, for all women in the very early stages of pregnancy, is higher than most of us realize, unnervingly so for women my age. And because miscarriage is often a private tragedy, few of us understand that seeing a plus sign on your EPT is not the end of the story that movie
s make it out to be.

  I hung up the phone, still in a daze. I slipped on pants, made one last attempt to dry my hair, raced downstairs, and hailed a cab. In the quiet of the car, in what felt like the longest cab ride of my life, the news hit me at last. I couldn’t stop smiling. Hearing doctors tell you that you can’t get pregnant does not extinguish the hope. Only after months of wrestling with the idea had I been able to haul the news of my infertility from the abstract and into reality. I had just begun to accept it, to make plans that took it into account. Now that mental struggle abruptly ended. I was purely, simply happy.

  I wanted so badly to tell someone, but I couldn’t call anyone from the cab. Though I’m on TV, I can still walk the streets of New York more or less anonymously. Among cab drivers, however, many of whom are from the subcontinent, I’m frequently recognized. Highly personal conversations are a no-no. So I was especially thrilled that my friend Christina was joining me for the interview. I got out of the cab, took her aside, and whispered my news. I felt giddy at hearing the words come out of my mouth out loud. Christina’s eyes got very wide and she beamed a smile from ear to ear. After the meeting, a question began to nag at my giddiness: not so much “How?” but the far more uncomfortable “Who?” This the tabloids would soon address with their usual delicacy.

  I never announced my pregnancy. I started showing and the press figured it out in the way they often do, with absurd speculation that’s wrong until it’s not. Just after the Emmys in late September a New York tabloid ran the article: “She’s Pregnant!” accompanied by a photo of me standing beside my cousin Manu on a red carpet with my hand resting near my belly. “And That’s the Father!” the headline read. Unaccustomed to brilliant tabloid guesswork, Manu was horrified.

  After the initial speculation the press wouldn’t stop harping on the fact that I hadn’t revealed the name of the father of my child. This prying and scrutinizing of my personal life in the pages of the tabloids was beyond anything I had previously experienced. The truth was that I didn’t know the paternity myself, until late that September. That early fall I was feeling pretty shaky. Guilt and the shame of how I had not only hurt Teddy and Adam but had also effectively embarrassed my whole extended family swirled around in my head, mixing with the undeniable joy and elation that I would, incredibly, be a mother after all. My emotions blew hot and cold simultaneously, and I could not tell what was due to my fluctuating hormones, and what was due to the very real and complicated facts of my life, induced by my own cavalier insistence on doing whatever I wanted.

  Even though my doubts about my future with Teddy lingered, I found myself wishing desperately that he was the father. The fact of this should’ve told me all I needed to know about my feelings for him. But before I could take that line of thought any further, I had to tell him my news: my miracle in one breath, an uncomfortable truth in the next. I told him about two weeks after I found out. He had been in London with his sons and my cousin Manu, who had by this time finished law school and started working with Teddy.

  Teddy had wanted us to have a baby together. We had even discussed the idea months before, when I had my first egg frozen. “Why don’t we just inseminate those eggs and get on with it?” he asked. My answer then was the same as when he’d suggested we get married the year before: “Let’s wait a little and see.” This became a refrain for me. Teddy, always decisive, would counter, “I don’t exactly have time to waste. Do you?”

  Now I would tell him that against all odds I was pregnant and that there was a good chance the baby wasn’t his. We had been open about everything. He knew every doubt I had about our relationship. He knew I was at times seeing someone else. Still, none of this would cushion the blow. Because for there to be doubt about the paternity, I had to have been with both men within a week or two. Who wouldn’t be hurt to hear that?

  When I told Teddy, I had to quickly follow the good news with the excruciatingly bad news. He was, understandably, very, very angry. I saw his face go white, and then beet red. He started to pace vigorously in the small living room of my apartment. It was as if the room could not contain him, or as if his body could not contain his fury at the information he had just received. He yelled for some time, the first and only time he had ever spoken harshly to me, hurling insults my way. He did not say he would leave me, but he wanted no part of any scenario that included Adam. He had been aware of Adam, and while I saved him the details, I had been quite frank with him all along. I think he assumed my dalliance with Adam was something I had to get out of my system, or would grow out or tire of. He was enraged. He wanted to punch something, he said, but didn’t know where to turn. He needed to leave my home to blow off the steam that was quickly rising, but I wouldn’t let him out of the house for fear of what trouble he would get into.

  Hot, heavy tears rolled down my swollen cheeks as I barred the elevator door with my body. In that moment, the sudden rush of how badly I had squandered the love and kindness this man had shown me began to sink in. I had no choice but to bear the full brunt of the consequences of my actions. I had to help Teddy express and expel the utter disgust he felt for me and the situation. I did everything I could to keep him in my home. I didn’t want him to have to deal with this alone or with anyone else. What would they say to him anyway? “I told you so”; “That girl is trouble”; “Get as far away from that mess as soon as possible”?

  Teddy did not waver from what he believed, even in that bind. When I said that I didn’t know what to do yet and had to sort things out, he jumped at me without blinking. “The only thing, Padma, that would be worse than this, that I will never forgive you for, is not keeping this baby. I will never speak to you again if that happens.” This caught me off guard, even though I knew full well about his feelings on the subject of abortion and a woman’s right to choose. It was certainly another issue we differed vehemently on, but I was startled by his aggressiveness and his assumption that that’s what I would resort to: the easy way out. But who could blame him?

  Sometimes we kid ourselves when we imagine our lives, expecting that everything will neatly fall into place. In my case, I had expected to meet someone who was “appropriate” and who I deemed a good match, fall in love with him, and then start a family with him before my biological clock stopped ticking. For whatever reason, Teddy had fallen into my life and would not leave. Adam had come into it, too, and kept reappearing, or I for some reason kept drawing him back to me. I had assumed a future with either man made no sense, little knowing how important a role each one would play in my life.

  When I told Adam the news, he didn’t know what to do. I had broken things off with him that past February and the hard truth was that we had not seen each other since, except for the moment we had fallen back together briefly in June. Adam had moved back to Texas and on with his life. I couldn’t blame him.

  Teddy had implored me not even to involve Adam, and was frustrated and angry when I did. Teddy had to overcome not only his own anger and pain, but also the embarrassment I had caused him publicly, which the press only magnified all over the world. The only thing that was missing from this emotionally nauseating picture was morning sickness, for which I was very glad indeed.

  I respected Adam’s wishes to be left out of things for a few weeks but could not contain myself any longer. I had grown up without knowing my real father. My grandfather and the rest of my family had, in their fury, ripped up every wedding photo that ever existed, and so I had no idea of what my father even looked like. For so much of my life, there had been huge gaps in the information about my lineage, a whole side of my genealogy that no one wanted to discuss. I remember going out to eat chaat with Neela as a child and looking around at all of the men who would be about my father’s age. I wondered if any of them could be him. Did I look like him? I had always wondered how my life would have been had I known my father and felt wanted by him. I wanted my child to know exactly where she had come from and to know that she was very wanted indeed.

  I did
n’t want my child to have the same identity crisis or hole in her sense of belonging as I did. I realized that asking one man to stay with me in spite of my carrying another’s child, and asking another man to be involved with the child I was carrying even though I did not want to be with him, was expecting a lot. But I knew that this was the right path for me, and the baby, though I could not tell if I would be able to will this situation into existence.

  I also thought it would haunt both Adam and me if we concealed the baby’s true paternity. Adam had always expressed a strong desire to start a family. Both his brothers had several children, and he longed to have his own. Thinking about how hurt he must be about the fact that this was not how he had wanted to start a family and that it was out of his control, I could not blame him for reacting the way he did.

  I spent many nights in my East Village apartment, tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep. I had not wanted to hurt anyone, only to have some space and freedom without a commitment. But I had hurt two people immensely. I had tried very hard to restart my life on my own terms. I would never have planned on having a baby this way, but I was not sorry she was here, in my belly. I resolved to do everything for the good of this child. I knew I would have to face the full brunt of all the gossip and embarrassment, the awkwardness and complicated circumstances around this pregnancy. So be it. I would take my medicine now, as much as I could up front.