Padma Lakshmi

The insidious reasons for a brown girl__ self-loathing won__ be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations__nd what they mean about your worth__ight not dawn on you while you__e playing cricket in the sand. What__ at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.

I once asked her if she was happy. __hat depends on what I am able to get done today,_ she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: __ mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?_ __ don__ know,_ she said uncomfortably, as if she__ never really considered such a question. __hen there is little you can do, you do what you can._ Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.

The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone__ tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn__ ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn__ allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

It__ funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it__ largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It__ funny how these old European men used a label like __other sauce_ when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.

The men on the show have it easy, in part because men on TV have uniforms: There__ the jacket, in black, blue, or gray. There__ the shirt, the pants. I can never tell whether Tom is gaining or losing weight beneath his boxy suits. He always looks the same. Tom also has the benefit of being Tom, a decorated veteran of the restaurant kitchen. Like so many chefs, he is practiced at the taste-of-this, taste-of-that eating regimen. I__ the one who has to look like a glorified weathergirl, with formfitting dresses and all, which, don__ get me wrong, I love__t least until I don__.

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__ 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__ 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 __ha-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__ mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.

Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. __ou should__e told us,_ they__ say. __e would__e helped you._ You__e not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you__e not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven__ starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.

We arrived from New York after a daylong slog through airports and planes and traffic. It was 10: 00 p.m. local time, but my body had no idea if it was night or day. Krishna was hungry, so I found some leftover dosa batter in the kitchen and started making one for her. Next thing I knew, my grandmother was by my side, commandeering the griddle. __et me do it,_ she said. __ou don__ know where anything is._ I insisted, but she won, even though by then she cooked with only one arm, the other still paralyzed from the stroke. Then my aunt Papu came in and yelped, __ou__e making your grandma cook?_ She was appalled. __t__ ten at night!_ Papu took over, my grandmother wouldn__ leave, and my uncle Ravi entered the fray. __ook at you,_ he said. __ou__e supposed to be this famous food person and you__e making these women cook at ten o__lock!_ I quickly remembered how it felt to live with so many people. Every move you make is scrutinized. You get up and it__ __here are you going?_ You come back and it__ __hy are you wearing that blouse? I like the other one better._ You walk outside and someone calls from the veranda, __on__ go that way, there__ too much sun!_ It was exasperating and suffocating and God, I had missed it.

I know most people use their phones to tell time, but there's something very romantic and beautiful about a timepiece.

I really like to sometimes go into food detox and eat very simply.

From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity.

You don't want your jewelry to make you look fat. A lot of what's out there now does - you just wind up looking like a Christmas tree.

In truth, I am a single mother. But I don't feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends.

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don__ regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

Perhaps I didn__ voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what__ flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.