Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi reveals she was called 'Blackie' in school, avoided the sun fearing she would 'darken and look like an Untouchable from the lowest caste of Indian society' and changed her name to Angelique to hide her heritage

Glamourous Indian-born American author, actress and television host of Top Chef, Padma Lakshmi, now 45, was sexually abused when she was seven years old and living with her mother and stepfather du jour in a small apartment in Queens, New York.

When her mother noticed a change in her daughter and the abuse was revealed, Padma was packed off to Madras, India, but not without what was the beginning of a life-time of self-doubt.

As a young girl, she hated the color of her skin and wished she could look like her blonde, blue-eyed doll named Helen.

In high school she changed her name to Angelique to try to hide her ethnic identity.

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Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi has recounted the details of her life in her memoir Love, Loss and What We Ate

‘To many Americans, my skin color signaled third-world slums as seen in Indiana Jones movies, malaria, hot curry and “stinky” food, and strange bright clothing— a caricature of India and Indians’

In her memoir, the 45-year-old recalls how Salman Rushdieneeded constant care, feeding and frequent sex and was even insensitive to a medical condition that made intercourse painful for her

The raven-haired beauty went through eating binges gaining as much as 17 lbs. in one season of filming her television show, Top Chef.

When she married British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, in 2004, all of her insecurities surfaced and she was diagnosed with a massive case of crippling endometriosis that effectively terminated their sex life and their marriage.

‘I’d had to be rushed to the hospital late at night— the tissue had wrapped itself like a tourniquet around my small intestines, though I hadn’t known then what was really happening. I had been in pain all day but didn’t want to disappoint Salman, who had reserved a table at Bouley weeks before.

‘How convenient for you. It’s not your period and it’s not ovulation. What is it this time?’ he coldly responded, she writes in her new memoir, Love Loss and What We Ate, published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Padma and Rushdie, famed author of the Satanic Verses, began their relationship in 1999 at a book party in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island in New York Harbor.

After Padma returned to Los Angeles, Rushie seduced her intellectually during frequent cross-country phone calls. She was lonely in what she describes as ‘the soul-sucking intellectual desert that L.A. was for me at the time.’

Rushdie’s phone calls were like a ‘nine-course meal airlifted in with iced champagne to boot’.

‘His attention, almost more than his charm, seduced me’.

Twenty-three years her senior, he was old enough to be her father. He was on his third wife, had two sons and lived in London.

Lakshmi, center, is pictured during an episode of Top Chef. She got a call from Bravo to appear on Top Chef, with master chef Tom Coliccihio, when it was in its second season

But he continued to call and ‘he was everything I wasn’t’.

She joined him back in New York for what she thought would be a platonic visit but she went back to his hotel and slept with him that first night. They married in 2004 in what was initially a blissful relationship.

His fragile ego needed frequent tending and the author lacked any self-awareness.

Padma tried to stay sexually interested and active for the demanding man, but her advancing crippling endometriosis left her in profound pain.

She tried to endure the painful sex by tossing down a drink, but her condition was severe. Without frequent sex, Rushie absented himself emotionally as well as physically.

After a difficult five-hour surgery and back at home, Rushie didn’t comprehend the impact the disease had on Padma and was unable to care for her.

He left on a business trip saying, ‘The show must go on, after all’.

As soon as Padma was well enough, in January 2007 she told him she wanted a temporary separation.

He replied, ‘You can have it but it won’t be temporary’.

He was gone from the woman he once loved but then called ‘a bad investment’.

The early years in their relationship were filled with passion and frequent sex but as her condition worsened, those tender years dissolved into heated exchanges and door slamming.

During the relationship, Padma had been experiencing panic attacks on the red carpet.

‘In these moments I was captured being what I most feared I would become: an ornament or medal. I was not a model, host, actress, or advocate. I was wearing a sparkly dress and standing beside a great writer. I was worried, whether I knew it then or not, that without him I would simply disappear’.

Padma’s endometriosis had not been diagnosed prior to her marriage and she had been in pain for more than two decades that started on her thirteenth birthday with her first menses.

‘The dark liquid, thick and oozing from me, heralded almost immediately a lifelong companion— cramping, pain, a numbing ache. It wasn’t very strong at first. I was distracted from the onslaught of my burgeoning womanhood. 

Her memoir also recounts her serious relationship with CEO of IMG Ted Forstmann (pictured above with her in 2010) who passed away in November 2011 after being diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer

While she was seeing Forstmann, she had an affair with venture capitalist Adam Dell (pictured with her in 2009) and eventually learned she was pregnant with his child

'The hair that grew between my legs and in my armpits, the newly puffy nipples, and a general awkwardness were as difficult to accept. Pain had not been totally unexpected anyway. My own mother had primed me for what lay ahead. “Some girls get it, and some girls don’t. It’s just our lot in life, part of being a woman,” she said.

Endometriosis can advance to where the lining forms layer upon layer in the uterus and ‘can pool outside the uterus and attach itself to all the internal organs of a woman’.

It is often misdiagnosed as it was with Padma until the night she was rushed to the hospital after the tissue had wrapped itself around her small intestines.

One week of every month she had chronic pain with her hormonal fluctuations.

It was this curse of her womanhood that affected her self-esteem.

But that self-esteem was initially impacted when she was seven, living in a crowded apartment in Queens, and sharing a second bedroom with a twenty-something relative of her mother’s husband, V.

‘One night I woke up to his hand in my underpants.

‘He took my hand and placed it inside his briefs. I don’t know how many times it had happened before, since I suspect I slept through some incidents. Even the incident I remember rather well remains blurred at the edges, a sort of half dream.

‘I had shown signs of distress. There was a space between my headboard, the bed, and the wall where I’d occasionally toss pink pistachio shells. Once I peed in this space, defiling the place where I’d been defiled’.

The sexual abuse was discovered when her mother found the pistachio shells and the urine that now smelled.

Lakshmi pictured left and right with her daughter Krishna. The Top Chef host lives in New York City with her daughter

Padma confessed to her mother and when V. came home from work, he had the young girl lie on the living room sofa and show exactly what had happened.

‘The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Madras. This was shortly after I finished second grade’.

Back in India, she learned cooking from her aunts and writes that she was transfixed by the demure women, dressed in their saris, rarely revealing any skin. But as her great-aunt’s housekeeper leaned over the cooking area, the saris dropped down in front and ‘I caught a glimpse of her breasts jiggling as the sharp smell of green chilies tickled my nose’.

‘I remember feeling a quiver in my stomach, an almost sexual thrill’.

When she had her first child, the housekeeper let Padma watch her breast-feed the infant.

‘Food and femininity were intertwined for me from very early on’.

And she learned that ‘to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat to be voluptuously full of food’.

Hosting food shows, Padma found herself always ravenous and has always struggled with her weight.

‘I’m always trying to re-create some vaguely healthy version of junk food.

‘You’ve got to have junk food. You’ve got to feel satisfied while still somehow keeping your waistline in check. This is the constant struggle that pervades my life.’

She comes hungry to every show taping so she can taste the dishes.

Afterwards though her stomach feels like a restaurant dumpster and she has invented a drink she calls Cranberry Drano to cleanse her system after the gluttonous eating on camera.

During the second season of the show, she gained seventeen pounds.

Top Chef felt like a pact with the devil. She had a stomach paunch and an unsightly pudge on the back of her arms that the cameraman had to shoot around.

That wasn’t the only thing she disliked.

Love, Loss and What We Ate is Lakshmi's memoir about food, family, survival and triumph

There were her mosquito bite scarred legs, stretch marks behind her knees and on her bottom from multiple weight fluctuations plus cuts and burns from years of being in the kitchen.

For years, Padma also felt insecure and self-conscious about her skin color.

‘To many Americans, my skin color signaled third-world slums as seen in Indiana Jones movies, malaria, hot curry and “stinky” food, and strange bright clothing— a caricature of India and Indians’.

‘I began to change into a person who contained two people within herself: a girl proud of and connected to her culture and native country, and one who wished she just looked like her old doll, Helen.

Her family advised her to avoid the sun out of fear that her skin would ‘darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields’.

She was called ‘Blackie’ in high school and ‘Black Giraffe’.

In high school when she was living in La Puente, twenty miles east of downtown Los Angeles, she changed her name to Angelique. That was better than Padma Parvati Vaidyanathan.

It took the Beatles trip to India in 1968 to create a pop culture moment for Indian culture.

‘For approximately four wince-worthy years, I was trying to hide from my identity’.

Her schoolmates thought she looked Mexican but she didn’t speak Spanish.

She was used to insults beginning in elementary school where they called her ‘Dictionary’ behind her back, yanked her long black hair in class or stepped on the heels of her shoes as she walked to class.

She was called the N-word in sixth grade, egged in seventh grade and punched in the face by a girl and had an egg smashed on top of her head. There was no end to the humiliation.

Padma raced to adulthood to escape her childhood.

‘I was not very experienced sexually, and when I wasn’t sober, I felt free to do things I wouldn’t normally do. It was the first time I had acted out my curiosities and fantasies. Some I regret, but not all, like knowing what it’s like to touch and be touched by a woman. Not since I kissed two boys in one afternoon during a seventh-grade field trip to an amusement park had I been that promiscuous.’

She doesn’t reveal any details of her promiscuity.

Padma’s next great love was IMG billionaire chief executive Teddy Forstmann.

The financier and philanthropist wanted to marry Padma but she wouldn’t commit.

She became pregnant but not by Forstmann. She stepped out of her relationship with the late billionaire investor and into an affair with venture capitalist Adam Dell, brother of Dell computers founder Michael.

She was hoping the baby was Teddy’s but it wasn’t. Dell stayed in Austin, Texas, while she had the baby with Teddy nearby.

Dell sued for custody of the child but did not win.

Teddy raised the little girl, Krishna for the first two years of her life until he succumbed to cancer in 2009.

Dell then stepped in and assumed responsibility of being the girl’s father although there was no longer a romantic link with Padma.

She dedicates this book to Forstmann – TJF.