Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (2 page)

We fell into bed that night. At 3:00 a.m., I woke with a start.
I’m naked in a married man’s bed.
I got dressed and skulked out of the Mark, feeling like a hussy. Once home, I showered, attempting to scrub away my shame. There were so many reasons we shouldn’t be together. He was married, for one, with a young son. He lived in London. The ominous cloud of the fatwa hung over his head. He was twenty-three years my senior, old enough to be my father. I consoled myself by resolving that there was only one decision to make; the next step was too obvious to doubt. We would stop speaking. I would go back to my life and he to his. But he kept calling. And I kept answering. I could not resist him.

Speaking to his disembodied voice allowed me to convince myself that we were still two innocents. Our courtship already felt like a dream. His face had lit up television screens in India and around the world. Even before the trouble with Iran, he was considered a formidable writer and a great intellectual mind. Up close I had known only the weighty world of lingerie modeling. His gravitas was the spark that lit my attraction. He was everything I wasn’t. He was a lot of what I wanted to be. He did not try to fit in. I had spent my career trying to be what other people wanted me to be, to embody whatever quality they felt was needed to sell jeans or bras or perfume. He had made a life of being different. I was totally taken by this man, and my admiration for him propelled me ever toward him. The fire burned because of his wit and charm and the connection between us. I had to admit, if only to myself, that this was not innocent, that now I had no platonic alibi to hide behind.

In him I had found a fellow wanderer, someone who knew what it was to always feel slightly displaced. In my case, I had spent years shuttling between India and the U.S., then later throughout Europe. He, too, was an Indian raised in the West. He understood my experience firsthand.

In L.A., I spent much of my time milling around commercial sets with teenagers. Many models don’t finish high school. The girls were sweet, the conversation less than stimulating. I was intellectually curious and I wanted to be stimulated and challenged. I loved books. The important mentors in my life had valued learning. There was Mr. Henniger, my high school English teacher and Academic Olympiad coach, who threw end-of-the-year parties where you had to come dressed as a literary character. He came as Godot, a sign on his chest reading, “I’m here!” There was Michael Spingler, a French professor from my college and later, when I was a starving model in Paris, a savior who invited me into his home to share pots of beans and lardons with his friends—bookstore owners, poets, and authors. There was my grandfather, a hydro-engineer who retired only to
get a law degree and become a practicing attorney, only to retire once more to become a tutor to college students studying math and science as well as the humanities. I was primed to value what Salman had to offer of himself, and it fed me so completely that I was blinded to everything else.

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.