Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 6

  During my mother’s pregnancy, they moved into an apartment just a couple of floors above the kissing cousin. He’d often leave my mother home alone, slinking in many hours after work ended and lying about where he’d been. One night, his friend Krishnan dropped by while he was out. Disturbed by the sight of a very pregnant woman left home alone, Krishnan stayed with her for hours. He was gone when my father finally stumbled home. She confronted him. “Where have you been?” she asked. “I told you, I was with Krishnan,” he said.

  I was born in Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi. My mother endured thirty-six excruciating hours of labor unmitigated by an epidural. She gave birth in a hospital bed, not at home as my grandmother had, but otherwise it was as natural as could be. I learned of her long labor from an aunt only a few years ago. Throughout our many rows, my mother never wielded it as a rhetorical weapon. All she ever said was, “Once I saw you, kanna, it didn’t hurt at all.”

  My parents were fighting constantly by the time I turned one. My grandfather came to the house to help resolve their disputes. Divorce was anathema to conservative Indian culture then. It barely existed in the cultural vocabulary, religious or otherwise. Most couples stuck out marriage, through thick and thin, infidelity and abuse. Yet when he heard my father spit, “Your daughter is ready to lick my boots,” my grandfather sided with his daughter over tradition and took her and me back to Delhi. They divorced a year after. But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them.

  Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.

  So, when I was two, my mother left India for America. She couldn’t afford to bring me with her. She couldn’t care for a young daughter while she studied for her local nursing license and worked in a hospital. She would spend the next two years diligently working in quiet agony, preparing a life for me. Tha-Tha and his second wife, my grandmother Rajima, raised me back home. While my mother prepared a life for us in New York, my grandfather tutored me for that life back in New Delhi. For those two years, I would effectively see neither of my parents.

  My grandmother tells me that long after the other kids had stopped playing and gone inside, I’d sit by the fence that enclosed our building’s courtyard in New Delhi. She would call me in and I’d shake my head. When asked what I was waiting for, I’d say, “I’m waiting for my mom to come home from office in America,” pronouncing the last word “Ahm-ree’-KAI.” In Tamil, my native language, you add the suffix “kai” to a plant to refer to its vegetable. I didn’t know America from bitter gourd. I certainly didn’t know it was a place across an ocean. I waited with my grandparents while my mother worked to make a better life for us. She sent for me when I was four.

  I finally rejoined my mother on Halloween night in 1974, exactly two years to the day after she herself had first deplaned at JFK. She picked me up at the airport wearing a poncho that she’d knitted. She had a blanket draped over her arm, because she feared I would suffer in the New York cold.

  On the way home in a cab, we passed many children in costume—witches and clowns and Batmen. I thought they were beggars, like the urchins on the streets in Delhi who would dress up and perform for rupees. But there were so many! We reached my mother’s apartment, at 405 East Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan. Inside near the door I noticed a bowl of candy, which I assumed was for me. But the doorbell kept ringing and my mother kept handing over my candy to these costumed kids! I was horrified until she explained the holiday. Ahm-ree’-KAI, I thought, a magical place where kids get candy just for dressing up!

  She gave me a very short tour of her one-bedroom apartment, which was much smaller than my grandparents’ home in Delhi. Of course, that didn’t matter to me. My mother’s presence more than made up for the lack of space. We lay together in her queen-size bed, under brightly colored covers, and I fell asleep excited—about candy and clowns, about our new life together. She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.

  My new life brought many changes—a new city, and my mother’s new boyfriend—but none as jarring as suddenly being deposited in the land of omnivores. My family members, Brahmins all of them, were strict vegetarians. In India, a large vegetarian population meant loads of options at the restaurants and street stalls. When I arrived in the States, I wouldn’t even consider eating meat, despite my mother’s pleading. It was the seventies and meat was considered healthy. She also wanted her daughter to explore and enjoy the city and its food along with her. The food at these restaurants was either too meaty or too strange for me at the time, and early on it was a struggle to feed me. Of course, she and her boyfriend, a Punjabi cab driver from Queens, couldn’t afford to go out and pay for a sitter, so I went out with them, too. (Dragging a kid along, even well past her bedtime on a weeknight, is squarely within seventies Indian tradition, which claims, disingenuously or not, that routine is not nearly as important as familial togetherness.)

  My mom did make sure that her culinary wanderlust took us exclusively to restaurants that had rice, virtually the only thing I’d eat. And so I became New York’s most practiced rice aficionado. At Mañana’s on First Avenue, my mom ate tacos as I focused on a heap of red-hued grains and beans. At the Japanese place near the Russian Tea Room, where customers sipped soups from small bowls cupped in their hands, I ate rice doused with soy sauce and Tabasco. I liked sitting on the floor and watching all the men struggle to remove their chunky-heeled boots and sit comfortably with their dates. In India, we always sat on the floor at home and took off our shoes before entering the house, so I was perfectly at ease there. At a long-gone Armenian place in the East Forties, I ate pilaf and cucumbers. And whatever I ate, I shoveled into my mouth with my right hand, just as I’d learned to do in India. Except for the occasional flat wood spoon that came with ice cream cups, I had never really used or even been presented with silverware before I got to America. Spoons and forks took me a while to get the hang of.

  We soon found our groove, though. Namely, we discovered that uniquely American phenomenon: the Salad Bar. Not only was there a seemingly infinite amount of food, not only was it all food I could eat—canned beets, kidney and garbanzo beans, onions and chutneys (“dressings,” my mom corrected me)—but you could also eat as much of it as you wanted. I’d pile my plate high, with as many colors of foods as I could, and then go back for more.

  In India, a meal was not a meal unless there was rice. In America, a meal seemed not to be a meal unless there was bread. Americans, it seemed to me, ate a lot of sandwiches. I was four when I made my first sandwich. I was hungry and hunger makes you get creative. What I really
wanted was a cheese and chutney sandwich, an Indian classic that the British pervert with cheddar and super-sweet mango relish. So I rummaged through my mom’s fridge and found a foil-wrapped block of Philadelphia cream cheese. I spread it on bread and added a good squirt of ketchup. One of my favorite vegetarian discoveries, falafel, always came tucked into bread, like a sandwich in the shape of a little purse. Since it was a sandwich, I assumed falafel was an American food, despite the belly-dancing music blaring from the joints that sold it. Most sandwiches, though, I thought of as “pink in bread.” The pink was either dark (hot dog) or light (bologna). I remained a lotus-eater until well into puberty, but when I did succumb to my mother’s cajoling as well as to some good, old-fashioned American peer pressure, my training wheels were made of bologna. The Formica of meat, bologna is meat denatured—no bones, no flesh, no blood. It doesn’t resemble anything mortal, which helped it go down, as did lots of mustard. But even before I gave up the ghost, my mom and I would frequent hot dog vendors, the chaatwallahs of New York City. As we named topping after topping—mustard and kraut and ketchup and relish—vendors would ask yet again, “So you want it without the hot dog?” Yes, we’d shake our heads in unison.

  Not long after I arrived, my mother married her cabbie boyfriend, V., at City Hall. I was their only guest. After they married, we moved to Elmhurst, Queens—East Elmhurst Avenue, to be precise. I remember almost every address, to the letter, at which I’ve lived. Perhaps I need to remember as a way of keeping track of where I have come from, since I shifted a lot between the U.S. and India. I pass the place every time I go to JFK Airport. My apartment in SoHo today is merely a few miles away from these graffitied buildings, but the forty-year journey between the two feels as long as the distance between the earth and the moon.

  Our building faced another identical building and the apartments in both were filled with immigrants. I’d explore the halls on my own, chatting up the old ladies shuffling around the courtyard. “Who do you live with?” I’d wonder aloud, and the widow would say, “Sweetie, I live alone.” No daughter to soak your feet in hot water after work (a concept I borrowed from the sitcom Alice)? No husband to take you out for kebabs? So I’d go back to our apartment, choose one of my mother’s brightly colored scarves, and present it to the widow. I did this with many women. The next time one of these women saw my mother, she’d thank her with watery eyes for the beautiful scarf. “What scarf?” my mother would say.

  The buildings teemed with children, a blessing for my mother. The winter would otherwise have had me cooped up in the apartment, yet I spent weekends roaming the buildings with a gang of Indian kids. We’d occasionally get a hold of some chaat and eat it in the halls—chaat is street food, and these were our streets. Shoveling it into our mouths with our hands, we’d earn funny looks from the non-Indian kids.

  Some nights, I’d join my mom and V. at a Manhattan movie theater that showed Indian movies and, as a lucrative sideline, they would set up a folding table next to the concession stand, from which they sold samosas, homemade chutneys, and hot chai. I helped out, mainly by fanning the napkins (as V. taught me to do from his bartending days, using a glass on its side) and devouring their wares, though at that age, one samosa made a meal. I spent most of the time haunting the balcony seats.

  I spent my days at Resurrection Ascension School in Elmhurst, Queens—which always struck me as an awfully long name for an elementary school, nearly impossible to get right at age five. My kindergarten teacher was Ms. Schliff, and my first class photo shows me wearing a lime-green, white, and black striped sweater, sporting a shag flip, and clasping Alistair Cooke’s book America.

  Every day after school, I went to our neighbor Elena’s apartment for three hours, until my mom got off from work and picked me up. Because I refused to eat any of the meat-heavy options at school, I also walked to Elena’s every day to have lunch. Elena got paid to babysit multiple kids in our building and had no shame about putting us to work. I got lucky. While some of the kids were assigned to pick lint from her maroon shag carpet, I got to help in the kitchen. Elena was Peruvian and she’d often enlist me to peel potatoes for empanadas. She let me mash the boiled potatoes with chopped parsley and adobo. I loved the smell of freshly chopped parsley, the satisfaction of crushing the vegetables, and the neat packaging of it all in pastry. The result would remind me of samosas and aloo tikkis.

  For lunch, I subsisted on cans of Campbell’s condensed soup, which my mother would lug to Elena’s by the bagful. Very few Campbell’s soups were vegetarian, so my options were limited to cream of mushroom, cream of potato, and the vegetarian version of alphabet soup, which made up for its lack of creaminess with its seductive letter-shaped noodles. I had tried cream of celery but winced at its metallic taste, and cream of cheddar was as gruesome as it sounds. I was disappointed to learn that the intriguingly titled “Pepper Pot” soup contained beef stock.

  Later, when I was a few years older, I started experimenting with the soups on my own. Whenever I was stuck at home and hungry, I could always pop open a can, mash the contents with milk or water, heat it all in a pot on the stove, and go to town. At first, my biggest challenge as a cook was successfully eradicating the lumps. Then, it was turning the soups into something worth eating. Along with the cream cheese and ketchup sandwich, one of my first creations as a cook was cream of potato doctored up with chopped jalapeño chilies. Soon I started adding dried herbs like oregano, mixing in a can of alphabet soup, and drizzling in the liquid from pickled jalapeños. I still save this spiced vinegar for brightening anything that needs it in my fridge today.

  V., my mother’s second husband, was a pretty darn handsome North Indian with fair skin and an occasional beard. A card-carrying member of the Playboy Club—a sophisticated quality at the time—he had a thing for chunky-heeled pleather boots, bell-bottoms, and wildly printed shirts open one button too many. He wore a chain with a medallion of the goddess Durga that nestled in the exposed tuft of hair on his chest.

  He drove a yellow cab by day and went to radiology school at night. My mother helped him, bought him a car (she did not know how to drive at the time), and over several years used her green card status to sponsor his mother’s, brother’s, sister’s, and brother-in-law’s immigration to America. Many of them stayed with us, at various times. My mother worked days as a nurse at Sloan Kettering and studied for a master’s degree at night, all the while helping to support a household of in-laws. Determined that I not lose touch with our family or culture, she somehow found money to fly me to India every summer without fail, and packed my suitcase full of gifts for all my relatives, including but not limited to bubble gum and chess timers, peanut butter and Pringles, vegetable peelers and can openers, bras and books, fashion magazines, LPs, sneakers and jeans, hair elastics and accessories, mascara, powder blush, perfume, eye shadow palettes, myriad of eye and lip pencils, and wool socks for my grandfather. She had an unmatched ability to cram consumer goods between my T-shirts and jeans.

  Some mornings, when V. was up early to start a day of driving, he would take me to school. My friends at Resurrection Ascension must have thought I was posh because I arrived at school in a cab. One winter morning, he dropped me off so early that the school hadn’t yet opened. It was snowing and I got so cold waiting in the schoolyard that I wandered into the adjoining church for shelter. The organ droned as parishioners attended morning mass. As a Hindu, I had never observed Mass, been baptized, or taken Communion. At school, while the other children rehearsed the choreography of confirmation services and taking Communion, the nuns made me sit in the last rows of pews. Yet that morning, the lone schoolkid among the early worshippers, I found an empty pew near the front and looked on as the priest spoke. I got up and sat down when others did, so as not to look disrespectful or like I didn’t belong there. Suddenly, the worshippers waded toward the pulpit, and I was herded along with them. Then I was in front of the priest and he was smiling and placing something on my tongue.


  I was used to eating as part of religious ceremonies. At home and in Hindu temples, our offerings, called prasadam, were fruits or sweets or spicy, savory snacks. What the priest fed me was the strangest prasadam I had ever had. Confused by the profound lack of flavor, I wondered whether I was meant to ingest this dusty object that possessed all the appeal of a piece of felt. I was suddenly afraid. Perhaps this was a decoy prasadam. Perhaps the priest knew I was an impostor, feigning piousness for shelter from the cold. Feeling guilty for being at church, where I knew I shouldn’t be, I was scared to chew, so my mouth hung slightly open, heavy with the religious contraband. I returned to the pew and sank in my seat, trying to disappear, the stale disc melting to a gruesome mush on my tongue. I was discovered there, cowering, by a stern nun, my first-grade teacher. “What are you doing here?!” she said, quickly divining the answer and prying my mouth open with a bony finger. “Dear, you can’t take Communion,” she went on. “You are not Catholic!” I thought I might pee in terror, but just then, the sister burst out laughing. I believe this was the only time I ever saw her smile.

  Our apartment in Queens was often packed with my mom’s in-laws. Many nights I shared a bed in the second bedroom with a twenty-something relative of V.’s, a state of affairs that, to people like us who were used to living far too many to an apartment in India, seemed relatively normal. I was seven. One night I woke up to his hand in my underpants. He took my hand and placed it inside his briefs. I don’t know how many times it had happened before, since I suspect I slept through some incidents. Even the incident I remember rather well remains blurred at the edges, a sort of half dream. I had shown signs of distress. There was a space between my headboard, the bed, and the wall where I’d occasionally toss pink pistachio shells. Once I peed in this space, defiling the place where I’d been defiled. My mother was shocked to see the mess of pink shells and urine that finally stank up the place. After I told her about the family member’s abuse, she told her husband. One day, I arrived home after school and V. made me lie on the living room divan to demonstrate by pantomime what had happened. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Madras. This was shortly after I finished second grade.