Free Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi

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