Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

interested me. I began by doing a piece for Anna Wintour on the scar on my arm, but I was terrified of writing it. Here, my future husband was extremely supportive and edited the piece before it went to Vogue. Having him upstairs in his office while I was down in the basement writing was daunting. But if I really got in a jam, it was also helpful—except that he knew little about fashion and had little patience for being interrupted. But he damn well did know how to write.
    The series on the Food Network did not get renewed after the first season. I did land a gig hosting a couple of documentaries called Planet Food for the network and for Discovery International. A sort of lightprecursor to Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations (but with better hair!), it involved my traveling to a country and getting to know its people through their food. They were hard shoots, but I was totally in my element. I loved nothing more than spelunking around a place and tasting my way through it. I had done as much throughout my modeling career anyway. All those years of traveling to shoot French bras in Bali and Scottish sweaters in the Seychelles led me to taste and experience the world in a way I would have never been able to otherwise.
    Because I had started modeling later than most, after my bachelor’s degree, I was able to appreciate it more. At the end of those many trips, my suitcase was jam-packed with strange spices and sauces, seeds and twigs. I would use these in my own kitchen back in Milan, Paris, or New York to try to re-create what I had tasted in those various corners of the planet. Coming from India and spending what seemed like most of my upbringing in the kitchens of my grandmother, mother, and various aunts (that’s where all the action was, after all), I valued and took a keen interest in spices. Living and cooking in Europe during my twenties taught me for the first time about French technique. And the modeling jaunts afforded me the possibility to learn how people ate in other parts of the world. But I was just a good cook with a bottomless curiosity about food. I had never in my life entertained the idea of a career in the culinary arts in any form until the Food Network thought I was capable of one. I still wasn’t sure they were right. I would have never even thought of publishing that first cookbook, but my publisher, who suggested the idea, thought there was a marketing hook, banking on our culture’s curiosity about models and their diets.
    The acting was slow going; my degree in theater mattered little. I would audition for parts in films and TV while still writing and modeling. I’d get a few bites or at least callbacks. Often I heard that they liked me but just “weren’t going ethnic with this role.” When it finally came out, Glitter was panned. The transition out of modeling and into a new career was a very haphazard and gradual one. I had to look hard at where my professional life was going and decide to be open to whatever work there was. My modeling career had been born of financial necessity, and then pursued because I had become easily accustomed to the lifestyle and, of course, the money. I had been able to pay off my college loans before many of my peers even settled into their first jobs or careers. But I felt some measure of self-loathing and deep insecurity for being in a profession that didn’t engage my mind, that seemed to be due to no accomplishment of my own but rather to the alchemy of the genes endowed to me by my parents. I wasn’t feeling guilty or bothered enough, however, to do something about it until the flow of work slowed down. My schedule also made it easy for me to travel around the globe with Salman for awards, literary festivals, and red carpets, but it was unpredictable and work came in waves. It was hard to plan dinners with friends and then have to cancel them at the last minute because some shoot or modeling job came up. And bookers don’t eagerly continue to push