Savor, p.16
Savor, page 16
Mohammad and I spoke at length and he reminded me of some truths I’d been avoiding in my response to my mother, including that I was angry and lashing out, longing to prove a point. I left the conversation willing to go to therapy, conceding that I had traumas to work through, but clear that I didn’t think it was going to straighten me out.
That’s the thing about identity, isn’t it? My preference for girls felt like only a part of who I was, not the sum total of it…yet, when I was told I could not be that slice of myself, that that part of me was lost or broken or wrong, then that fraction became the whole. It became as essential and undeniable as my brown skin, as my being Muslim, as my passion for cooking, as my femininity, as my family. I am the sum of these things, but if you try to take from me one tenet, I will fight as though that piece of me is all that I am.
I think the reasons my mother listed for my “disorientation” were ways she subconsciously felt she’d fallen short as a mother, the traumas were things she felt responsible for. All the guilt and failure she carried with her as a parent were manifested by my preference for women, as if it was her punishment.
“I believed in you,” she said. “You talk about how broken you are because you have hurt some girl who you just met for a few months. How little you understand of what you have actually done to hurt your mother. This has to be the worst ever in my life. I trusted you and gave you every opportunity that was possible so you could pursue your dreams and passion because you convinced me to allow you this opportunity and that you will never let me down. You betrayed my trust.”
My sexuality, or rather me being judged for it, was her badge of shame.
Saadia, Sarah, and Mohammad were expected to bear some responsibility in sorting me out too, but apart from checking in on me every once in a while, what were they supposed to do? They certainly weren’t going to convince me of anything, or even try to. It eventually dawned on my mother that no modern-day New York City therapist worth their weight was going to try to “fix” my sexuality—help me work through childhood trauma, sure, but straighten me out? Not so much. While America is far from perfect and has more than its fair share of bigots, New York City is a mecca of acceptance and individuality, a melting pot of identities who fly their freak flags proud and high.
When my mother came to the CIA for graduation—and, theoretically, to take me home to Pakistan—I broke the news that I’d already lined up a job and an apartment in New York City. What was the point of CIA if not to use that knowledge in the real world? I pleaded. I begged her to let me have one year in the city getting experience working in restaurants and I made it a fight for my professional dreams rather than an issue focused on my sexuality or freedom. I also promised to do everything I could to “fix myself,” as if I was flawed or broken, a chipped porcelain cup, in order not to let this opportunity go to waste. It was an act of self-preservation.
My mother had a tendency to react badly to situations that triggered her, and then swing back to being the more open-minded, modern woman I saw her as, and I prayed this situation might be like that. Indeed, she eventually acquiesced and allowed me to stay in New York, but with an enormous qualification: She was moving to New York to be with me.
chapter 23
THE WOMAN I MADE
Farezeh
On the cusp of her graduation from CIA, I looked at Fatima, who despite being the portrait of a strong, focused, persistent, and tough young woman, was emotionally very vulnerable. I knew how trusting she was and how she assumed the best of everyone around her. It was easy for her to fall in love, and I believed it came from insecurity, and a hunger to be loved and embraced.
There were so many traumatic events in Fatima’s life that would leave an impact on anyone in her position. There were times during her childhood when I was unavailable to her—whether it was because I was tending to my sick brother, or because she was at CIA, or because I was in Dubai with my husband. So much had changed, so many new people had joined each of our lives, and somehow the distance between us grew as she let go of my hand. I decided I was going to make her my sole focus. I was again peering at her through the ICU window as a baby. I was going to hold on to her. I was not going to abandon her—a pattern that too many people in Fatima’s life had repeated, whether it was her father, my own diverted attention onto Saadia and Sarah, then later onto my brother and mother, and even Mohammad’s adolescent aloofness, which must have sucked so much confidence out of her.
Fatima was always so sure that every person she was with was The One. From what I could tell, she dove headfirst into these relationships and turned them into mythological mountains and miracles. There was a predictability to how she built up these characters she was seeing, these model humans who ticked all the right boxes, and after a few flops, we had started greeting her sweeping descriptions with some polite skepticism. The important thing, I rationalized, was to bring her to a point where she was sure and uncompromising about how she deserved to be treated, so she didn’t feel like she needed to fill the space occupied by various people she loved and trusted but who eventually abandoned her, leaving a void. She was worthy, she was brilliant, she was a superstar, and she didn’t need to seek this out from anyone.
When Fatima told me she was in love with a woman, all I saw was a gaping void she was trying to fill. And I felt like anyone who would say and do the right things to and for Fatima would be welcomed into her life and positioned as a permanent fixture, no matter how ill-suited they were for her. As she tearfully told me over Skype, all her trauma came to the fore and the uncomfortable realization dawned on me—how could anyone experience the things that Fatima had and remain emotionally healthy?
Maternal guilt set in strong, and began to ravage my insides. I felt wholly responsible for allowing her to get to this point. My choices, neglect, and distracted gaze had led Fatima to a place that was unhealthy for her, and any relationship springing from those roots would surely be doomed to fail and cause her more harm. The pain I saw in her eyes from this relationship breaking down made me flash back to all of the times she must have felt this, felt abandoned, or rejected, or some sort of failure she may have internalized. I would not have that for my daughter and Fatima was going to get the help she needed to fortify herself. She was going to set her broken emotional bones right.
But until she was in a healthier place emotionally, I did not want people to know—loose lips might cause further damage, unwanted attention and judgment that would threaten what I believed to be her vulnerable state even more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t prevent this, and when the knowledge fell into the hands of those who did not have Fatima’s or my best interests at heart, it was weaponized and used against us. That Fatima failed to see this inevitability only frustrated me more: She lacked perspective, maturity, and good judgment. And I needed to intervene and get her to where she needed to be instead of where she was.
Perhaps I was projecting, but Fatima becoming the subject of gossip and ridicule triggered every protective instinct I had. I had been intimately undone by gossip, from the moment my father died through to the time I left my husband. I have seen what it can do, the decisions it can drive us to make. And while I knew Fatima thought she had skin thick enough to survive it, I was not going to let her unclothe herself like this.
My plan was to bring her back to Pakistan after her graduation from CIA. I sensed that she’d not been ready to leave the nest in the first place, and was at risk of getting lost in the jungle of New York City life. Fatima, on the other hand, had already set up a life for herself: a job and an apartment.
And then, through my fog of concern and anger, I remembered my time in Austin. If Fatima had to work on her self-esteem, there was no better opportunity than to become her own person in a city where it was only possible to make it if you had the tenacity and drive. I would not deprive her of that, knowing what it did for me.
So I changed course: I came for her graduation and brought her eleven-year-old brother Bangu with me, and stayed on with her in New York City for six months, helping her set up her own little place and find her rhythm in this bustling, mad metropolis. We three lived in a small one-bedroom in a four-story walk-up on the Upper East Side.
It was my first experience of my daughter as an adult, of witnessing firsthand her commitment to her craft and professionalism, her deep love for what she did. She got up to go to work before dawn. Every night at midnight I called her to see when she would be home and she said, “Mom, go to bed. I have to close up.” She’d get home at one in the morning, then leave again at seven a.m. I’d visit her in the afternoons sometimes when I knew the restaurant wasn’t busy with lunch or dinner service, and Fatima was so serious, so intent on what she was doing, she’d give me a quick hug and then shoo me away.
It was so clearly Fatima’s destiny to become a professional chef, and I encouraged her and supported her culinary education, but it dawned on me as I waited up for her at night or heard her tiptoe out while I was still sleeping that I’d had no idea what that really meant—what the life of a professional chef looked like. The hours on her feet, the backbreaking work in scorching kitchens, the machismo and hierarchy she had to climb through on her way up from the bottom. I had understood none of it. Perplexed, assuming she was working that hard for the income, I offered her money, but she refused. It was autonomy she wanted: freedom and respect.
Although I arrived in New York intending to bring my daughter back with me to Pakistan, I saw that Fatima was thriving despite the long hours and physical exhaustion and the daily challenges of beginning a career. And the city was seducing me as well. New York is a heady drug. Bangu and I would walk every day for blocks and blocks, finding snacks to eat at hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Every time I took its energy in, I understood why Fatima wanted to be in New York. I completely got why she was smitten with her life here. It was positively riveting in comparison to what she would be able to do in Pakistan.
I told my husband that I thought the best thing he could do for Fatima’s sisters was to send them to New York for graduate school. I wanted this sense of opportunity and accomplishment for them, too. We didn’t have a lot of money, but Fatima had her apartment and that meant the girls could all live together. I knew that if they stayed in Karachi that they’d soon be married off, in keeping with the indelible pattern of things. In New York they could all hustle and find their respective ways; it would be good for them to feel independence, to learn more about themselves and this world. To be the women I knew they were meant to be.
chapter 24
CHICKEN INTESTINES AND PROCLAMATIONS
Fatima
After my graduation from the CIA in 2011, my mom and I signed a short-term lease on the Upper East Side for the summer. Then, in the fall after Bangu left, Saadia joined us in New York and the three of us lived in a 475-square-foot one-bedroom on Thirtieth and Second Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. It was a quintessential New York first apartment—fourth-floor walk-up with a mice infestation—but less typical was that as a young college grad, I was living in my tiny New York apartment with my mom.
My mother and I slept on cheap futons in the living room, the type that folded down the middle like tacos and became sofas during the day—and Saadia slept in the tiny bedroom. It was intense living in such close quarters with my sister and my mother and also when my mother returned to Pakistan and Sarah took her place. Our proximity echoed the early years of my mother’s second marriage, when Saadia, Sarah, and I all shared a room. Thankfully we three sisters had grown up quite a bit since then. The days of mean taunts and exclusionary conversations between them were long since past. I was happy to help Saadia get a part-time hostessing job at Vermilion, where I worked, which kept her busy along with her studies, and show her the ropes of the city that I already felt at home in.
For my part, I dove into my line cook job. Chef Maneet Chauhan had opened Vermilion two years before in Midtown and the CIA had flagged the opportunity for me, because Maneet was also a graduate. I’d done my research: Maneet, an Indian-American from Punjab, was twenty-seven when she landed her first executive chef gig at Vermilion in Chicago; that was only five years older than I was when I walked into the kitchen of Vermilion’s New York location for the first time, straight out of school, ready to take on the world. At this point, Maneet was about thirty-five, enough older than me to inspire awe and idolatry from afar, but the moment I walked into her kitchen, I felt supported in my learning and safe to ask her anything. Chef often walked around with a smile, but she led her kitchen team like a heroic general and cussed like a sailor, a particularly appealing combination in someone who was six months pregnant. I adored her immediately. Whenever I went to her with questions or curiosity about a process or an ingredient, she made the time and space to answer every one of them and to teach me. I think she saw something familiar in me: I, too, was a brown girl who had chosen a less-traveled path into the kitchen. We had both opted for culinary school over traditional degrees. I think she saw my determination and ambition, which made me the first one in before service and the last one out, departing with exhausted satisfaction. The first three months were exhilarating—glorious, mind-bending days when my legs shook from fatigue as I climbed the stairs home and I fell asleep writing notes to myself in my Moleskine notebook, trying to safeguard the day’s lessons before, after a few hours sleep, it all began again.
I actually saw more of Saadia at work than I did at home, since it was at work where I spent most of my time. I’d been hired as both a sous chef and the floor manager, so I spent three days up front and four days in the kitchen. I was doing seven-day weeks, fourteen-hour days. While I was theoretically happy to learn more about both “front of house” (the restaurant positions that interact with guests, such as servers, bartenders, and managers) and “back of house” (the kitchen positions, like sous chefs, line cooks, and dishwashers), there was a problem: The general manager seemed to have a vendetta against me from day one. He followed me from station to station, from the prep kitchen into the walk-in, from the host stand where I checked the reservation books back into the kitchen, badgering me and bullying me, trying to get inside my head.
During culinary school, when Binda had been doing her externship and had struggled with a superior at work who gave her a hard time about everything, she’d come to me.
“I don’t know why the head chef hates me so much,” she’d said through tears.
“It’s not personal, Binda. You can’t let it get to you or get you down. Instead, just try harder. Prove to the chef that you are more committed, more passionate, more hard-working. Force her to teach you,” I told her.
I recalled this conversation with Binda when things were bad at Vermilion and truly tried to take my own advice, but to no avail.
Three months into my time there, when Maneet left for maternity leave, the GM’s harassment became unbearable. I reported him and he was immediately fired, but the environment was tainted for me and I wanted to move on and start fresh. I wasn’t going to let that experience break me, but I also wasn’t going to wallow in a place that had become sullied. I wish I could say that my five months at Vermilion was the last time I saw aggression or men in positions of power abusing subordinates, but in our industry, of course it wasn’t.
Maybe it was some leftover rebellion from having been bullied as a kid in Texas, or perhaps it was the whiff of similarity to the subjugation of women in Pakistani society, but I simply wouldn’t take it in my new life. From that point, if things got ugly, I just quit.
I found out they were hiring at Café Centro, the restaurant where I’d done my externship during culinary school. I jumped on the opportunity to work under Chef Jan Hoffmann, who ended up not only hiring me as a junior sous chef, but encouraged Patina Restaurant Group to sponsor my visa, which they did.
About a month into my new job at Centro, the chef de cuisine quit suddenly, so as a twenty-two-year-old sous chef, I quickly found myself in charge of the whole place. I worked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and catered VIP holiday parties. I would get home from dinner service at one a.m. and then wake up at four for a private breakfast event. I worked sixteen-hour days, wedging in a drink with friends after a shift, coming home after my family was already asleep and leaving for work before they were awake. I was very casually seeing someone, which was tricky while I was living with my mother—but my total focus was on my career. The priority was strictly to gain more real-world kitchen experience and confidence, to climb the ranks. But I also tried not to lose sight of my wider goals.
In Pakistan, I’d spent all those afternoons watching cooking shows, dreaming of someday having one of my own and creating a platform where I could make an impact. It was obvious: The more famous one was, the more money one made, the more good one could do, and there was so much work that needed to be done, so many hungry bellies to feed.
But no one was going to “discover” me in the sub-basement of a restaurant kitchen, so I knew I needed to be proactive, to “get myself out there,” and creating an on-camera experience felt like a logical first step. A chef I was working with at the time encouraged me to apply for the Food Network competition series Chopped, and I pored over the application with my mother’s help. It was a good thing she was a pusher too, or else perhaps I would not have had the courage to go for the interview.
They immediately accepted my application and invited me to participate. My mother was almost as excited as I was, and on my day off took me shopping for new clothes and makeup to wear to the shoot. In each episode, four contestants are given a box of ingredients they must use to create a dish under intense time constraints, and then the dish is judged by a panel of well-known chefs. At twenty-two, I was the youngest competitor of the four. I had graduated from the CIA just eight months before we shot it in the winter of 2012.
