personal history
A visit to madam Bedi :
I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.
written by Tara Westover
A visit to madam Bedi (Tara Westover)
the new yworker, February 17 & 24, 2025
pp.86-91
p.86
My friend Sukrit invited me to India.
His mother lived in Delhi. He said I should get out of England and give my eyes something new to look at. He wouldn't be there -- he was trapped in a biology lab at Stanford -- but his mother would look after me. I could stay as long as I liked.
The invitation confused me. I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother. I pawed at the idea, then dismissed it. I did not want to go east; I wanted to go west. I was waiting for my family to reclaim me.
p.86
I must have seemed bewildered. Somehow my friends knew. It must have been present in the tone of my voice, its vinegary flavor, because one night, when I was speaking on the phone with Sukrit, who was settled in California, whom I had not seen in the whole of that year, the conversation faltered and into the gap he repeated his strange invitation. He said I should go to India. And this time when he said it, without knowing the reason, I said that I would go.
p.86
Sukrit was from Delhi, with a royal lineage on his mother's side. His grandfather was an inspector general. His mother was a high-powered government official. Sukrit had grown up with guards and servants, and he carried himself like someone who had. Like someone who belong at that school.
p.88
Sukrit had explained to me the hierarchical nature of Indian culture -- that seniority trumps almost everything, even gender -- but seeing it now, I found it difficult to believe. Who was this woman? My notion of India was of a country averse to granting women power. Yet here she sat, cloaked in it.
p.88
The dinner was set in steel bowls -- lentils spiced with cumin and coriander, roasted cauliflower, cubes of chicken braised in tumeric. Saffron rice and a thin bread called chapati.
p.88
She said Kapisa was run by warlords,
Even some of her own Afghan subordinates refused to meet with her, because she was a woman.
p.88
chapati, lentils, cauliflowers.
p.88
Bollywood
"The men there loved Bollywood. Many had lived in Pakistan; they knew the old cinema. They were crazy about Shah Rukh Khan. When they found out that I had seen him once, when he was shooting a movie, they were delighted to talk to me."
Madam Bedi told me she sent to Delhi for a case of Bollywood CDs and DVDs, which she handed out to drivers and assistants and interpreters. They were grateful; they began to feed her information. They would tell her which roads to take and when. They would say, "Thursday you must stay home. Thursday you must not travel at all." She said Bollywood saved her life.
p.88
a cup of black tea, which was bitter but also sweet, with flavors of cardamon and ginger.
p.88
in her experience Americans could not tolerate curried flavors in the morning.
p.89
Never in my life had I seen anything like it, a woman waited on by a dozen men.
p.90
No one had ever told me that delusion is not a nutrient, that you cannot build a true future from a false past. [[ ?? ]]
p.90
One night, after I had been in Delhi for two weeks, Madam Bedi asked how Sukrit had been at Cambridge. I said that he had done well in everything except cooking.
"Once he tried to make biryani in my kitchen," I said.
"I know," she said. "He called to ask how much garlic. It was two in the morning in Delhi."
"You told him three cloves."
"I did."
"You told him three cloves," I said. "But you did not tell him what a clove it."
Her chapati tell from her fingers and she looked at me, mouth sagging, eyes fixed.
I nodded. "He put in three heads of garlic."
She laughed then. The sound was girlish, joyful, and I realized that her features, when at ease, were impish.
"He didn't even peel them," I said. "They went straight into the pot, skins and all."
Now her head jerked back and she laughed with her whole self.
I told her that I had shouted at home for ten minutes. I told him that no recipe in the history of time, not in any culture, alive or dead, had ever called for three heads of unpeeled garlic, but he insisted that if the garlic needed peeling, his mother would have told him.
Madam Bedi was looking ahead now, gazing into nothing. She was smiling. She loved her son, and she loved poking fun at her son.
p.91
Her star was rising, and her husband resented the steady accumulation of her successes, her recognition. Outside the home, she was powerful, but inside her status as a wife gave him absolute power.
p.91
She needed his approval to do this radical thing. But he would not give it. He said that she could not divorce her husband. She had a public name to uphold, a family name. She could not flout social mores so flagrantly. She would be pilloried in public, denounced in private.
She divorced her husband.
p.91
She said that she had travelled to visit a friend in Varanasi, the city in the north where the dead are sent to be burned. She had arrived in a weakened state, half wrecked, hardly able to hold herself together.
p.91
"I broke", she said. "That is how I kept from breaking."
p.91
She said that one night, sitting outside the city, on the banks of the River ganges, watching the smoke rise, she had come to pieces in the arms of her friend. She had wept, bitterly and with such evidence she thought her chest might tear open.
"I succumbed", she said. "I stopped denying the wounds and I felt them, felt their width and breadth. Pain can be clarifying. If you are able to feel it, the pain itself -- the true knowledge of what doing nothing is costing you -- will tell you what to do."
p.91
I fell asleep remembering the story, the words and the way she had said them: I travelled to Varanasi. I watched the dead burn and the smoke rise. I was destroyed by my life. I succumbed, and was destroyed.
p.91
The source of my power is that I weep.
She had given me the answer. But I do not believe her.
2:53 PM 4/26/2025
the new yorker, February 17 & 24, 2025
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