Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 29

  July 30, 2010

  This week was very eventful and exciting for KT. She arrived at her ancestral home in Madras to uncommonly cool weather and a warm welcome by her auntie Neela and her great-grandmother Jima. She had a couple of days of being cuddled and doted on and then went to Mumbai for two nights at the presidential suite at the Oberoi hotel where her mom had a photo shoot and every member of the staff promptly fell in love with her. She also experienced her first monsoon and had a lovely view of the Arabian Sea as torrential rains filtered the sunset over the bay outside her window. It was a very spooky and beautiful welcome and one that she took much glee in. She especially enjoyed her large bathtub but was overjoyed to return to her newly discovered bucket bath at her great-grandma’s place. She also managed to turn on her side all by herself and then actually turn back. She pushes off her aunties’ hands and inches forward to what looks like a mini crawling motion. She then gets tired and turns over. She also had her first taste of carrot, which she seemed to enjoy but then needed to be topped off by her mother’s milk anyway. One has the sense that Krishna is very at home here. She is fascinated by her own face, as it now often sports a tiny jeweled bindi on her forehead. In fact, it gives her great pleasure to look at herself in the mirror and she is wondering why her mother insists on wrapping herself with this new type of dress but notes that the sari gives a greater sense of privacy and ease for breast-feeding. She has her own portable tent at all times.

  December 12, 2010

  Krishna is growing long and lovely. She is 29.5 inches and weighs 18.5 pounds. She is now able to stand by herself for 2 to 3 seconds before collapsing back down on her bum. She also learned how to clap her hands this week and give her loved ones a high five by slapping their hand. While she has an immense treasure trove of toys, she prefers to play with her mother’s silver coasters by knocking them off the coffee table and letting them clatter onto the floor, flinging them hither and yon. She loves lentils and rice with kale and cumin as well as mashed potatoes but has no palate for avocados whatsoever. She is pooping copious amounts.

  June 3, 2011

  Krishna had a happy week. She is starting to remember passages to familiar songs she sings with various loved ones like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Lula-lu.” She is also having a growth spurt and at times it seems she wakes up in the morning visibly bigger in size than when she went to bed just hours before. She also knows how to smile on cue for the camera and juts her face forward chin first. She has obtained possession of a much-coveted sable hair makeup brush and uses it to paint the cheeks of faces in her beloved magazines. She also rubs it across the back of her hand, enjoying the soft feathery bristles against her skin. The only blip was that she bumped her face quite hard into the wooden part of the bed at the beginning of this week and has a little bruise not only on her forehead but on her cheek as well. Those in her household are encouraging her to walk slowly rather than run but it seems our girl knows only one speed: full steam ahead.

  I thought that by giving all this detail to Adam, especially since we were not speaking, I could show him that she was well cared for, and that Teddy and I were giving her a loving family life, even if it was not the traditional one he perhaps envisioned. But all this information only enraged him. He must have felt very left out. And so all his anger was harnessed in the contents of the court filing.

  When I got to my hotel room, I was in shock. I couldn’t believe Adam was suing me for full custody of our child. I couldn’t imagine why he thought this was a good idea. My nanny, who had spent the afternoon with Adam and Krishna, knew about the lawsuit even before I did. Adam had had the “courtesy” to break the news to her just before he sent the two of them back to me. She was horrified and came home worried that I would be wrecked, unable to finish the shoot in the Bahamas. Luckily, by that time I had been hosting the show for quite a few seasons. I knew how to tune things out, or at least ignore my thoughts until I had time to fully process them. I just needed to get through the rest of the shoot, crown the next Top Chef, and go home. What made the experience particularly excruciating was that Adam was staying in the same hotel that we were. Over the next few days, some of the crew and executives actually bumped into him on the beach. He said cheerful hellos to them like nothing had happened, which made my colleagues deeply uncomfortable.

  I called Teddy as soon as I reached my room and had fed Krishna. She was for some reason ravenous and wouldn’t let go or stop suckling for a very long time. I did not want her near me when I spoke to Teddy, because I needed to vent out all my rage and sheer incredulousness at the stupidity of a public lawsuit. Who could be foolish and thoughtless enough to give the tabloids a court filing that contained the Social Security number of our child? Who could be such an idiot? And what father would think that this type of stress on the mother wouldn’t bleed and affect a nursing infant?

  When I phoned Teddy, he immediately said, “I know all about it, Junior.” Jim Gallagher (the head of communications at IMG) had received a call from a friend of his at the Associated Press, who had a copy of the whole court filing on his desk already. It had been almost a year since Krishna was born, and more than that since we found out I was pregnant. In all that time, once I had made my decision to include Adam, Teddy had never once said, “I told you so.” But now he really didn’t know what else to say. He came down that weekend to give me moral support and even brought my assistant, Tucker, along on the plane for good measure. That Friday, when he arrived sometime in the early evening, I could only collapse into his arms and weep. “I tried to tell you . . .” He trailed off.

  Teddy told me that of course he would try to be there for me as much as he could, but he really couldn’t help things that much. “When I was in a position to help, Junior, you didn’t take my advice.” He said he knew my heart was in the right place, and that I was trying to do what was best for Krishna. “What you experienced with your old ex-husband is a picnic compared with what you’re in for now. Just prepare yourself. Things are going to get very ugly, and I can’t save you from this. You’ve got to face the storm. This is what you get for inviting this person into your bed, and into our lives.”

  It was very difficult to hear this, but Teddy was not a bullshitter. He would not soften the blow, because that would not have done me any good. We slept with the baby between us that night, hugging each other over her body. I felt like the world was about to crash over my head in the morning. I did not want the night to end.

  The next morning I was to go back to work and he was going to play golf. Neither of us had slept very much, so as I went off to hair and makeup, and he said he wasn’t feeling well, a bit tired and out of it, I didn’t think much of it. He had had a hard week himself. Teddy decided to take it easy, to go to the beach or read the paper by the pool. That did seem a little odd to me—Teddy loved golf.

  As soon as we landed back in New York there was a lot of work to catch up on with the jewelry company. And there was also a ton of planning and preparation for the lawsuit. The rest of January was a blur. I spent most of my energy trying to get our collection done for the buyers we had coming through the showroom in late February. February also meant the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament, in which Teddy usually played. This year, he had asked his younger son, Everest, an excellent golfer, to take his place. Teddy seemed even more invested in the competition now that he was rooting for Everest, and even Judy—a dear friend and ex-girlfriend of Teddy’s who had functioned as a mother of sorts to the boys—came with us to Northern California. Golf was something they did together, and they all loved it. I loved being there, and getting to see Judy was a treat, even if I personally did not know which end of the golf club was up. I was happy to be out of New York and to focus on Teddy and Everest and Krishna, leaving my troubles behind, if only temporarily.

  I knew that, privately, Teddy was feeling bittersweet about bowing out of the tournament. But, he said, lately his swing just wasn’t what it used to be—and he felt
he hadn’t had adequate time to practice. His swing had also become somewhat unpredictable. He could not control his shots as much as he felt he should’ve been able to, especially when he was normally a scratch player with a zero handicap. Teddy was hard on himself and had trouble accepting his limitations, but he was smart enough to know when he wasn’t up to playing. So having Everest out on the green was a great plan. Secretly, selfishly, I wasn’t upset about it at all. It gave Krishna and me a chance to spend more time with Teddy. I remember lying in the grass near the sea after breakfast, with him uncharacteristically joining us on the ground just looking up at the clouds. He had been slow to get up that morning. We lay there and Krishna sat on his stomach, and the three of us were just sunning ourselves in the chill early-spring air. “Isn’t this better than walking miles and miles just to whack a ball with a stick?” I said jokingly. “I am not going to answer that,” he said to me. Patting Krishna on the back, he said, “But Madam Junior, you understand that playing is better than watching any old day, right, kiddo?” He had taken to calling the baby “Madam Junior,” or “Madam Squared” as a joke. Teddy got up then; he could never sit or lie still for long. I was struck by how he struggled to get on his feet. That was unlike him.

  Later that day, when we were walking the course, with me pushing Krishna in her stroller as we followed Everest’s progress, I noticed Teddy had trouble keeping his balance. He had almost tripped, over nothing, an invisible stone. When I went to help him, he pulled his arm away, saying he had just underslept and was tired—something he had been saying a lot lately. I suppose I really didn’t start to truly notice or worry about Teddy’s health until that trip to Pebble Beach. Teddy was turning seventy-one that week. I had never been around a man that age who was as fit as Teddy. In fact, few men I had known, at any age, were as fit as Teddy. So when he started to slow down, I assumed it was the normal slowing down of someone in his stage of life. Also, he had come back from the African safari the year before with a case of spinal meningitis, or so it had been diagnosed. He had suffered terrible headaches ever since, and everyone kept saying it took a very long time to get over something like that. He was, after all, of a certain age.

  But Judy hadn’t seen him in a while, and she noticed the difference right away. From the moment she had boarded Teddy’s plane in L.A., she had let him have it. “Teddy, hon, you don’t look good,” she’d drawled in her thick southern accent. “What the heck is wrong with you? Are you eating well? Padma, honey, are you keeping him out too late?” I could only point to Krishna, whom I was nursing under a blanket, a gesture meant to contain the whole of Does it look like I’ve been having many nights out, with or without Teddy? “Teddy, go see a doctor. Padma, drag him if you have to,” she ordered.

  I felt horrible that I hadn’t noticed the severity of the change in him. But Teddy was proud and hated to seem weak in any way, and I am sure he hid many small signs from not only me, but also the world, just as he had tried to hide almost tripping on the sideline at Pebble Beach. We landed back in L.A. after the tournament. He and I spent the next two days in a specialist’s office, as Teddy took test after test. He did every test his doctor could think of, and nothing turned up. I tried to celebrate his birthday by calling a few of his friends for a dinner at his house in Beverly Hills. In the end I called them all back to cancel. Teddy did not feel like company. He said he wanted only to be at home, alone together.

  The next month he would, in frustration, check into the Mayo Clinic the minute they had an opening. There he would finally have an MRI, which Teddy had resisted getting because of his extreme claustrophobia. I offered to go to the Mayo Clinic with him, but he declined. He said I had too much going on, and he didn’t want the baby dragged there. I think he was scared. I think he knew something was not right at all, and he didn’t want me there to witness it with him. Teddy prided himself on seeming invincible to me, and as far as I was concerned, he was invincible. I tried to protest, but I was also aware of how compartmentalized Teddy’s life was, even at the best of times. He had definite ideas about when and where he wanted to let people in. Having gone through a very intimate health crisis myself, I understood his need for privacy, and I respected it. But I did not like it just then. Teddy had always been there for me, even though perhaps I had not always deserved it. It was hard to let him go without me.

  A few days later, my cell phone rang as I was boarding a flight to Florida, where I was headed to the Home Shopping Network to sell my Easy Exotic brand of culinary products. I saw that it was Teddy. I was struggling with the baby and the stroller, and getting both on the plane. So I called him back when we were settled into our seats. He was still at the Mayo Clinic. He said they’d found something in his head. The MRI had come back showing a mass around his brain. The doctors advised him that it could be an infection or something much worse. They referred him to a specialist surgeon at Sloan Kettering. I wanted desperately to get up with the baby and run off that plane. You did not get referred to Sloan Kettering unless there was a serious problem. They treated only one kind of malady there. Teddy told me to stay put. Suddenly, my little budding spice and tea business seemed trifling at best. I felt trapped by the plane’s shutting door. “I will meet you in New York at the end of this weekend,” I whispered into the phone. Tears streamed down my face, and I tried to turn toward Krishna in order to hide my face from the cabin crew standing right over me ready to demonstrate the safety procedures. Just weeks before, we had been in the Bahamas, and Teddy had been consoling me as I received what I thought was my worst nightmare. Now I wished, with all my being, to be with him and confront together what actually was our worst nightmare. It seemed impossible. I spent the rest of the flight clutching Krishna to my chest and sobbing quietly under a blanket.

  In early April, Teddy would have brain surgery at Sloan Kettering. He went to see a surgeon there named Dr. Gutin in the last days of March. Gutin explained that the mass could be a brain infection, a benign tumor sitting on his brain, or glioblastoma, the most serious form of brain cancer, for which there was no cure. Teddy said we needed to pray for a brain infection. He wanted to do the operation right away. He wanted to get it over with and get to the bottom of what was invading his head. The doctor said he would go in surgically and relieve pressure on the brain, but also remove anything he safely could that didn’t belong there. I could understand Teddy’s hurry, but my mother had by phone prepared me for what he might be like after the operation. I wanted just one more week, or month, or year, with Teddy and Krishna and me together. I wanted desperately to have a stretch of time that was calm, that was some form of normal, if only so we could taste what it felt like. I needed more time.

  The September before, I had turned forty. On a hot, sweaty late-summer night we celebrated with much fanfare. The party, held at the restaurant Indochine, had a Toulouse-Lautrec theme, a marching band, and cancan girls traipsing through the restaurant. Among a sea of faces, many of whom he did not know, Teddy had toasted me. He spoke of how he thought I was “very capable, of doing whatever she sets out to do.” I didn’t feel capable at all at times. In fact, his unwavering belief in me outshone any real confidence I had in myself by a mile. But he was a great dreamer, a motivator, a doer, and a leader. As he toasted me, I found myself thinking about him, about the depth and indefatigability of his love and loyalty. He was not my baby’s father, but he loved her, more than life itself, provenance be damned. He was there when I delivered her. He was the first one to hold her. When they took turns waking each other up at night—she with her crying, he with his snoring—I laughed, exhausted and enraptured. She was not permitted to watch TV, but she was allowed to play at his feet when he watched hours of golf and tennis during those summer afternoons at the beach house when I deemed it too hot for her to play outside in the sun. That night, I had blown out the candles on my cake and wished for some harmony in our lives, to be able to simply love each other and have some laughs.

  Everything had seemed so hard; even the
good was mixed with strife and stress. The lawsuit only compounded that. But the news of something in Teddy’s brain made all that had passed seem like child’s play. Since Teddy’s MRI, the lawsuit had turned into a menacing white noise. It hissed insistently in the background, following me everywhere, but I barely heard it now. It was a big stone in my shoe, but I kept walking. That was the terrible blessing of Teddy’s health crisis: it had a shockingly clarifying power.

  I woke up very early on April 5 and left the baby at home with the nanny. I traveled up the FDR by taxi, as I had done so many times, to meet Teddy at his home before accompanying him the few short blocks to Sloan Kettering. He had tried to keep me away, but I wouldn’t agree. I think it was again because Teddy didn’t want me to see him be afraid. He was always my rock, and still wanted to be. We were escorted to the pre-op room. It had the stale smell of rubbing alcohol and surgical tape. It was moderately crowded and humming already with uniformed nurses and surgeons milling about busily. Most of the other beds were occupied, with one or two people surrounding them. I remember thinking it was cold in there, and even felt the breeze coming down from an air-conditioning vent. The room was large and had several beds, each near a totem pole of stacked square computerized machines sprouting tubes that whizzed and whirred and lit up in sections, depending on who was hooked up to them. I could hear the hiss of a breathing machine. I heard a gurney traveling fast, far away down the hall.

  I could tell by his body language that Teddy hated it here; he was physically irate. I pulled a thin white curtain around the bed to give him some privacy. He sat on the squishy hospital bed. The rubberized mattress beneath the cotton bedding squeaked under his weight. He removed his clothes, and as I folded them, he put on a wrinkled and flimsy cotton gown with ties in the back. He handed me the gold chain he wore around his neck and never took off. It had two gold Catholic pendants, and an oval tin one with Mary on it that I had given him. Mother Teresa had given it to me when I visited her in Calcutta years ago, and I had given it to him a couple of years back because it was the most precious thing I owned. When we pulled back the drape, the nurse suggested he wear the hospital-provided socks with slip guard strips, as the floor was slippery and not too clean, either. I kneeled down to put them on his feet. “Aww, jeez, would you getta load of this scene,” he said, incredulous and looking down. “Hey, this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying to avoid all along,” I shot back. We both had a good laugh. I was glad to be there. I answered all the questions on the clipboard the nurse was holding, while another nurse started an IV on Teddy’s arm.