One could argue whether Salman Rushdie fell in love with
Padma Lakshmi for her looks or her personality. We may never know —
but I’m willing to bet he fell in love watching her make a batch of
Spanish olives.

On location in southern Spain for a recent installment
of her cooking show Planet Food, Lakshmi dips her fingers gracefully
into a wooden bowl and tosses plump black and green olives in a bath
of salt water, hand-cut fresh fennel and other herbs.
Padma
Lakshmi is tall and fine-boned, with caramel-coloured skin and
waist-length wavy black hair. Her voice runs half a beat slower than
most mortals’ — forcing the listener to slow down and pay attention.
She’s as irresistible as her cooking.
Her appearances on
Planet Food and another cooking show, Melting Pot, now seen on
American cable television’s Food Network, have made hers a familiar
face on TV. She’s in Mariah Carey’s debut film,
Glitter, playing a
would-be disco singer. And until September 11, Lakshmi was a
familiar sight on New York society pages as well, seen on the arm of
her companion, acclaimed and controversial author Salman
Rushdie.
But the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the US Pentagon changed all that. Rushdie is lying low these
days, and Lakshmi is refusing to talk about him to the press as a
matter of security. “I just feel like that is a part of my life
which is somewhat private,” Lakshmi says. “It’s important for me to
keep something to myself.”
Lakshmi’s office had us sign an
agreement before granting the interview. “You will not ask or
discuss the recent and tragic events that occurred in New York with
Padma,” it read. “You will not ask about the Middle East. You will
not ask her any questions about her personal life in reference to
her companion Salman Rushdie.”
“Frankly, I think we’re kind
of old news,” says Lakshmi. “It’s nothing complicated. That’s the
thing — I was somewhat known before I met him, because of my
attributes. If someone is interested in me, then they’ll be
interested in me for the right reasons — or else they weren’t really
interested in me in the first place!”
Lakshmi was in Los
Angeles on September 11 and saw the devastation in New York on her
television. “It’s very sad, and very weird, and it didn’t seem
real,” she says. “I grew up half in Chennai and half in Manhattan.
When I was a little girl, my mother used to say, ‘If you ever get
lost, look up, and when you see those twin towers you will know that
is south. You can orient yourself from there. It’s like someone
bombed my childhood playground.”
Before becoming a cookbook
author of Easy Exotic and cooking show hostess, Lakshmi worked as a
fashion model for some of Europe’s top houses, and appeared in a
couple of Italian films.
In Glitter, Lakshmi adds an
understated but aware comic presence as Sylk, a gorgeous but
untalented disco singer who lip syncs to Carey’s flawless vocals.
Seems Sylk is being groomed for stardom by a record-producing
boyfriend, and until Carey’s vocal tracks are laid in over hers, we
can hear Sylk’s wobbly and slightly off-key voice in all its
splendour.
“I didn’t want to make it so burlesque that it
was unbelievable,” she says. “So I made it bad, but not too bad.”
And strangely enough, Lakshmi isn’t that bad a singer to begin with.
“I grew up in a musical household, so I can sing a little bit. I
don’t have an operatic range like Mariah does, but I can carry a
tune.”
These days, she divides her time between New York and
Los Angeles, where she started a production company, Lakshmi Films,
six months ago. “It’s very small,” she says, but one of its projects
will be a film she wrote and plans to direct, set in her native
South India.
“I don’t want to make it seem bigger than it
is!” she says with a laugh. “But I’m excited about it, and it allows
me to exercise my love of movies in other avenues, instead of just
waiting for someone else to decide that I’m perfect in this way or
that way.”
All this focus on acting and producing has meant
that she’s too busy to do the cooking shows any more — “I think I
was sort of cooked out, anyway” — but since the shows are still
airing, she still gets stopped on the street by fans. “People from
all walks of life watch the Food Network,” she says. “Just half an
hour ago, I went to the grocery store to get some ready-made food —
some cold poached salmon, and I thought I would make a salad with
that. I was tired and didn’t feel like cooking. And this guy looked
at me and said, ‘Oh, so is this where you get your food?’ I thought,
‘Why is he saying that?’ and it took me five minutes to realise he
had recognised me; I’m still getting used to people knowing who I
am.”