Avenue – July/August, 2006

Salman's Muse
by Janet Allon, photographs by Gray Scott

With several movie roles and her own television show on the horizon, actress and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi, aka Mrs Rushdie, steps out on her own.

Seated in a corner booth at Artisanal in Murray Hill, Padma Lakshmi loosens her long, dark, silky hair from its ponytail and advances a theory: She plays muse to her husband, the writer Salman Rushdie. But theirs is no ordinary artist-muse relationship, because, somehow, Padma explains, she showed up in his books before the two of them had even met, before they had even heard of one another.

The primary evidence for her theory is contained in Rushdie’s acclaimed second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won him the coveted Booker prize and put him on the international literary map. This was way before his book The Satanic Verses earned him the deadly ire of fundamentalist Muslims for its portrayal of their prophet Muhammad, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, a $5 million bounty on his head, and instant worldwide status as a symbol of free speech. One character in Midnight’s Children is named Padma, another is Parvati, which happens to be the real Padma’s middle name. In Fury, Rushdie’s first New York book, she shows up  in the form of Neela, an exquisite Indian woman with a long scar on her arm, which rather than marring her appearance, somehow enhances it by serving as a reminder of the fragility of beauty. Padma Lakshmi has such a scar, a remnant of a car accident she endured as a teenager, and it too adds something to her beauty, perhaps an element of mystery. “I'm very glad to have that scar,” she says firmly, meaning she is grateful to have survived. “Very glad.”

She definitely possesses the necessary precondition of musehood:  dazzling and elegant beauty that can be so distracting it sometimes needs to be played down just so she can function normally—walk down the street, or sit in a restaurant. It is, of course, the first thing people notice about her, helping Lakshmi to become the first Indian supermodel and to catch Salman’s eye when he saw her picture in a magazine before they met. Unbridled, her appearance is apt to attract the sort of response it did at their wedding two years ago, when she was said to be such a vision that when she made her entrance in a two-piece purple sari baring her midriff, the audience erupted into cheers, whistles and catcalls.

But as muses go, Padma Lakshmi is an awfully hardworking one. She is by no means leaving her shot at immortality in her husband’s hands. Though she is multi-talented, acting has become her primary passion and focus. She shot two films this year—a historical movie called Sharpe’s Challenge for British television and a remake of the Ten Commandments, in which she played Princess Bithia to generally favorable review—and this winter she will shoot Deepa Mehta’s new film, Exclusion. In the fall, she will begin shooting her own television series, called The Loft, at the Richard Meier building at 165 Charles Street. A salon-style show, it will combine cooking—Lakshmi will prepare recipes from her second cookbook, which she is putting the finishing touches on—and scintillating in-depth conversation. The guests, she says, will be a mix of artists from film, music and literature, and there may even be a few sports figures of exceptional interest. “I’m interested in innovators and iconoclasts,” she says. “My wish list would include Jonathan Safran Foer (author of Everything is Illuminated), Margaret Cho (comedian), Julian Schnabel (artist), Ben Harper (singer-songwriter), and Bill Buford (former fiction editor at the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed cooking memoir Heat).”

So diverse are Lakshmi’s talents—she appeared on the cover of Newsweek as a symbol of the new global Indian economy, writes a fashion column for Harper’s Bazaar, and has hosted a show on the Food Network—that she says she will cut down on some things in order to focus on acting. “I find that I am happiest in the kitchen and on the set,” she says. “Both cooking and acting require intense focus. They are full-immersion activities.”

While she has always been ambitious, she is more determined than ever to succeed as more than just the wife and inspiration of a famous man. “Being married to a giant cultural figure like Salman Rushdie, I want to earn my seat at the table,” she says. “After all, I was a published author before I met Salman. In fact, it was my publisher who introduced us.”

The couple met in 1999 after the release of Lakshmi’s first cookbook—the award-winning Easy Exotic:  A Model’s Lowfat Recipes from Around the World, published by Miramax Books—when Miramax held a splashy launch party for Tina Brown’s now-defunct Talk magazine at the Statue of Liberty. Both of them had known of the other’s existence before then. Salman had once read an article on Padma’s increasingly successful modeling career, and been proud of his fellow Indian. He had also said to himself that if he should ever meet this comely creature, his “goose would be cooked.” Rushdie’s third marriage was unraveling, and he was beginning a love affair with New York after years of hiding out in London. He was 56; Padma was 32.

It had been 10 years since the calamitous and world-shattering event that changed Salman Rushdie’s life forever. The Ayatollah’s fatwa, declared on February 14, 1989, resulted in deadly rioting all over the world and murderous attacks on some of the book’s translators and publishers. Rushdie went underground, not making a public appearance until 1993, when he surprised an audience of music fans by walking onstage at a U2 concert. The historical significance of the fatwa cannot be overstated, says Fouad Ajami, an author and leading commentator on the Arab world. “The Rushdie affair was the first we saw of the darker Islamist movement that had begun to take root in the West.” He says. “It was a forerunner of things to come.” The fatwa was also, Ajami explains, a ploy that “Khomeini used to deflect attention away from the highly questionable truce he had signed with Saddam Hussein after the Iran-Iraq war.”

In 1998, with Khomeini dead, the Iranian president Mohamed Khatami officially withdrew the death edict, although there remain Islamic extremists and religious leader who believe that it is in effect forever. After the attacks of September 11, and last year’s London subway bombing, some commentators said: “We are all Salman Rushdie now.”

But by the time Salman and Padma were courting, the couple felt comfortable enough for strolls in Central Park. And though they are still security conscious, they do make public appearances. They are both active in the worldwide writers’ organization PEN—Rushdie is the president, and Lakshmi had served on the gala committee. Together they started the PEN World Voices literary festival in 2004. "Padma was a huge dynamo the year they launched the festival," says Tina Brown, who is also involved with PEN. She sold about 10 tables to drooling admirers in the financial world just with the flick of her elegant cellphone.”

The festival came out of Salman and Padma’s shared conviction that Americans need to hear voices from other parts of the world now more than ever. “I think America is perceived in a much worse light than it was in the Clinton years,” Lakshmi says. “This administration has squandered whatever good will we had after 9/11. I think we need to hear other perspectives from around the world in order to understand the consequences of our actions around the globe.”

In addition to left-of-center politics, they share a sense of humor and a love of New York. “We love the park, the museums, the restaurants and the Yankees,” says native New Yorker Lakshmi. “Salman has taken to New York like a duck to water. It’s very endearing to have the man your love embrace what you love about your hometown.”

For Salman, a city is its people. “It’s the people I like best about New York,” he says via e-mail. “I have many old friends here, and many new friends from the last seven years.” Among those he counts as close: writers Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Jay McInerney and Christopher Hitchens, as well as Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Diane von Furstenberg. “I love Salman and Padma,” von Furstenberg says. “They are a wonderful couple and the city is very lucky to have them. Salman’s talent and courage are unique. Padma is beautiful, strong and determined, and her brilliance has only begun to show.”

Though Salman and Padma are fellow Indians, their backgrounds are very different. Rushdie was born to a wealthy Muslim family in Bombay, has family ties to the Kashmir region, and was schooled in England, Lakshmi, a Brahmin Hindu, has family in New Delhi and Madras (now called Chennai), and she was raised shuttling between New York, where her mother was a nurse at Sloan-Kettering, and South India, where her grandparents lived. Though born Muslim, Rushdie is a rather well-known atheist; Padma, a Hindu, says she visits the Temple of Lakshmi whenever she is in India. It is pure coincidence that her surname, Lakshmi, is also the name of the Hindu goddess of abundance and prosperity—the goddess, Padma says, “who is usually prayed to for success in any endeavor, but mainly work, business or anything having to do with professional tasks.”

After spending much of her adolescence in New York, Lakshmi attended Clark University, where she intended to study psychology but instead fell in love with theater arts. After school, she began modeling, primarily as a way of paying the bills, and quickly became the first Indian supermodel. “There were not many Indian models at that time,” she says. “I was kind of a novelty. It makes me really proud to see other Indian models succeeding now.” But she also had her eye on acting, and began her career in Italy, eventually moving back to Los Angeles to pursue it full-time, then back to New York, which she loves. “I’m an East Coast girl,” she says. “I love the seasons, the snow, ice skating in Central Park, I love the sense of history.”

Lakshmi still faces ethnic hurdles when it comes to getting acting roles. “I’m sure I have the same experience that actresses like Halle Berry and Eva Mendez have had,” she says. “When someone says, ‘We’re not going ethnic in the role,’ there’s really nothing you can say or do. In many ways, Hollywood has just not caught up yet. I’m just as American as anyone else.”

If Padma’s muse theory is correct, Salman says, it has not always been a conscious process. “In general, “ he writes via e-mail, “the safest (and of course truest) answer is: yes, I owe it all to Padma, muse extraordinaire. It is Padma’s scar in Fury, and Padma’s apartment in Shalimar the Clown. (Though the other inhabitants of the building, including Olga the potato witch, are my own work.) As for Padma the pickle woman in Midnight’s Children, she has, as my wife had disapprovingly pointed out, hairy forearms, so that rules her out; but the Padma-Parvati naming coincidence is striking to me too.”