Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (7 page)

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.

Many potential explanations exist for my decampment. For one, my mother had been part of the team that had secretly treated the Shah of Iran at Sloan Kettering. For that, she received death threats, including a
call to our apartment. “We know where you live with your daughter,” a voice had hissed. At the time, however, all I knew was that I had opened my mouth and got sent away. My mother was right to immediately put distance between me and that man, of course. In retrospect, however, he should have been the one to go. Years later, in tears, my mother would acknowledge this grave mistake.

My grandmother Raji—or Rajima, as I called her, because she was still too young to be called
paati
—had led a life harder still than my mother’s. Though
I
never knew any other grandmother, Rajima was not my mother’s mother. My mother’s mother died when she was thirteen and my grandfather married Raji three years later. One of sixteen children, in the deep-southern district of Tanjore, she was just another hungry mouth for her parents to feed. She was fourth in line but her mother became pregnant with another child soon after her birth in an effort to produce a male heir. A male child had been born but died before the age of two. Raji was not a boy, nor was she fair-skinned like her younger sister Vasantha, who would later receive dance training, an investment by her father made in the offspring most likely to provide some return. Her parents sent her away as a young girl to live with an aunt who had no children. Rajima was probably sent away to give her mother some breathing room, as caring for several kids while also being pregnant put a strain on her health. When she came back at five years old, she did not call her mother Amma. She did not know her; she could not bring herself to call her Mom.

Instead, she eventually acted as mother to her twelve younger siblings. A natural-born teacher, Raji honed her skills by shepherding her brothers and sisters through their studies. At age eighteen, she signed up for a Montessori teacher training course and later found a job as a teacher and even
started a school in her province where there had never been one prior. The job became her ticket to independence. It staved off an arranged marriage, at least long enough for her to develop her career. It took her from Tanjore to Madras to New Delhi, the nation’s capital in the north. By thirty years old she had, unlike many Indian women of her day, seen a bit of the world before duty called.

Raji had come home from teaching in New Delhi for summer vacation when a meeting was arranged by my grandfather’s sister. She had heard that my grandmother’s family was looking to marry off an older daughter. Raji’s younger sister (the dancer) Vasantha’s husband, a business magnate named V. D. Swamy, arranged it from the girl’s side. My grandmother was doing well, but in those days an unwed woman pushing thirty was not looked well upon. My grandmother was earning money and helping her older sister Kamala, with whom she lived in Delhi. But a single woman always presented the potential danger of being an added dependent to her family. Back then, a woman was not seen as a full adult, but rather a ward either of her own family or of her in-laws. She would have been a constant liability until her future was settled with marriage. My widower grandfather went to see Raji in Tanjore with my young mother in tow one evening in early summer. They talked extensively that evening and the potential groom’s party left the next day.