In his memoir Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie has some critical and often bitchy things to say about the women in his life. Padma Lakshmi, his fourth wife, gets the unkindest cut. He describes her as vain, inconsistent in her affections for him and capable of saying laughable things like: “There’s a bad me inside me and when she comes out she just takes whatever she wants.” He could see that they weren’t quite suited for each other but he was mesmerised by her beauty. That was some spell as the couple was together eight years. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie comes across as an brave champion of free speech (though there are those who believe his fight for the cause was not as innocent as he’d like people to think). But as far as the women in his life are concerned, he comes across as a bit of a jerk.
Many reading Padma Lakshmi’s new memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate will be chiefly interested in what she has to say about Rushdie. Lakshmi gets right down to it. The opening chapters are all about her marriage to the author. She’s far more gracious than Rushdie and writes with charming honesty about being overwhelmed by his intellect and pleased that being with him offered her passage to a world of literature and the arts. She says she lacked this sort of fulfilment as a model and was always conscious about her conservative and educated Tamil Brahmin family in Madras thinking she led a frivolous life. After marrying Rushdie, she was having dinner with the likes of Susan Sontag and Don DeLillo.
The bad part of the marriage was dealing with Rushdie’s vanity and his lack of sympathy over her health. She was diagnosed with endometriosis. She writes: “Nor do I doubt that what seemed like a desire for me was also in part a desire for what I provided – an adoring audience…But after a party, everyone goes home. Me, I went home with him. I was the full-time, live-in audience.” The book explores two of her other romantic relationships, with Adam Dell, the father of her daughter Krishna, and Teddy Forstmann, the late American billionaire who was 30 years older than her.
Naturally these bits are less gripping as neither is as interesting as a celebrated writer with a lethal fatwa hanging over his head. More compelling is her narrative of her childhood years. She was raised by a single mother who had been through two failed marriages; and was uprooted several times as a kid in India, where she spent the first few years of her life, and later in US when she was made to move from New York to the West Coast. In the US, she had to deal with a temperamental stepfather and with jibes about her gangly frame by classmates in school. As an adult, she had to negotiate an uncertainty-filled career as a model, TV host, actor and cookbook writer.
What has remained constant through the vicissitudes of Lakshmi’s life is her love for food. Love, Loss, and What We Ate is peppered with recipes of dishes that have been milestones in her life. These include kumquat chutney, which she makes in the months after her separation from Rushdie; thayir sadam (curd rice in Tamil), the staple of her childhood; and cranberry ‘drano’, a laxative (what else can a drink “to help cleanse my digestive pipes” be, she writes) she’d prepare while filming the American TV show Top Chef. It’s endearing and fun to read about her cooking a meal of lemon rice and chicken curry for Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Susan Sontag, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt while they’re chatting in the living room. She felt out of her depth with these heavyweights and cooking provided some sort of fortification. “If they were judging me, they never let on,” Lakshmi writes of her dinner guests. “For all of Salman’s warnings that there was ‘good Susan and bad Susan’ Ms. Sontag was always a pussycat.”
Love, Loss, and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi, HarperCollins, Rs699.