“Freedom comes when you learn to let go,
Creation comes when you learn to say No”
- Madonna (The Power of Goodbye)
When Suvir Saran, the first Indian chef to win a Michelin star in North America, decide to write an autobiography, you expect him to tell us the secrets to his success, the tips that raised his culinary skills to a level the world couldn’t have enough of, the go-getter persona behind it all, a man at the top of his game.
But instead, what you find in Tell My Mother I Like Boys, just out, is a story of a man who is crumbling and afraid as any other, restless, broken, ill and struggling. As he puts it, “You are a Michelin star chef, your books sell, people stand in line, but you are hollow within…a celebrity who smiled big at the camera, but was actually crying and faking it.”
To bracket the book as an LGBT+ empowerment book would be to do it a disservice of sorts, for as Saran recounts, “It’s about living; living your truth.” The example he gives is telling: when a friend handed the book for reading to a homophobic cousin who did not know Saran at all just to see her reaction, what happened was dramatic. The floodgates opened as the cousin read it and broke down.
“I’ve never opened up to any relative about this before, but my husband used to beat me for several years,” the woman confessed to her cousin, and added, “He’s so brave.”
It’s a coming out story that becomes much more than a coming out story, it becomes a coming home tale, a deeply personal exploration of not just identity and queerness but also about the struggle for self-acceptance. How being broken inside can become a beginning, and where creativity, through culture, music and of course food, became the cure that helped him transform into living ‘without apology’ (even if his mother did ask him why he was airing his laundry publicly!).
Saran’s roller coaster story moves between Delhi, Mumbai and New York, and with a brief, but life-defining interlude in Nagpur where his bureaucrat father was posted. That is where, at age 7 or 8, he sensed his sexuality for the first time, which he describes as “something wrong about me…and I never had words for it. The burden of that secret mad me think my body will be perhaps found by somebody someday — these were the nightmares that I started having as a young kid.”
The troubled young child found solace, if it can be called that, in music, singing songs at school, learning Sanskrit from his grandfather, doing needlepoint stitch, macrame crochet, embroidery, even joining meal planning class in school, where the teachers were shocked a boy wanted to join it.
Perhaps that was an inkling of what future held. Sexuality did play a part, for he describes his entry into his mom’s kitchen, helping her out and picking up tips and tricks of the trade (which, in hindsight, helped him out professionally), as a sort of escape from the glaring eyes of the world, he felt, was judging him. “I literally folded myself in the pleats of her sari and felt (that) if I couldn't see the world, they couldn't see me.”
But the world soon did see a side of him that it liked. After studying in Mumbai’s JJ School of Arts, he moved to New York to study Visual Arts, where life had a different plan for him.
“In America, while I was being ‘Othered’ for how I looked, when they ate my food, they loved me.”
Working part-time in retail while studying in the Big Apple, Saran used to host dinners at his pad in Manhattan which soon became by word-of-mouth ‘the best food being cooked in New York by this Indian student’ — “Sometimes Hollywood stars, sometimes politicos, because a friend told another friend who told someone else…” Saran says without batting an eyelid of his successful soirees. Then one day, an investor ate his food, and told him, open a restaurant. First catering, and then Michelin success with the restaurant Devi, which was the first time an Indian chef got the coveted restaurant star in North America (Indian chefs in London with Michelin stars went before him, followed recently by wins by Indian-origin chefs in the US and Thailand — no restaurant or chef within the country have got the rating yet).
As Saran puts it, “People came for the novelty. They came back for the flavour!”
Success spawned stardom, as celebrities and the press vied for his attention, cameras followed him on to the red carpet and his books on food, from the hit ‘Indian Home Cooking’ to ‘American Masala’ to Masala Farm’, sold millions of copies. And love, too blossomed, with a longterm relationship with Charlie Burd, with whom he co-owned a 70-acre farm in upstate New York.
Then life decided to give him some hard knocks.
Saran’s dream run unravelled in the late-2010s, as the frenetic pace of his Manhattan lifestyle took a toll on his health. Saran himself describes his dejected return (the relationship with Burd too died out after more than a decade together) as “a man who came back to India with defeat.”
“I had a tryst with death, and I lived to tell the tale. And since India gave me a second chance, I decided to stay back.”
Back home, Saran slowed down, focusing on consultancies and occasional columns in Indian Express as well as some other publications. The writing caught the attention of good friend Shashi Tharoor, as well as book publishers who asked him to write a book again. He says it was literary agent Mita Kapoor who convinced him to write Tell My Mother I like Boys saying that ‘people in the world today are having an identity crisis. Everybody’s busy on Instagram but nobody’s having any intimacy. We need someone who can show us the reality, and the possibility.”
Which is perhaps why Sarin is a bit reluctant, the in-your-face title of his book apart, to bill his book as LGBT writing. “It's not just an autobiography done to tell people I’ve owned Tiffany and Prada and Gucci,” he said, adding, “No, each chapter tells a story of a challenge, of a journey, of a growing up, of a reckoning, of a success coming, but seeing the other side of it. It is everything that life is, not just all the painted rosy picture that people try to tell us it is. It's a very truthful exposure of life that is normal and sane and crumbling and afraid as any other.”
Having said that, Saran is aware of the impact of an established Indian celebrity coming out with a book like this, and it starts with going beyond the affluent class. Saran says publishers are in touch with him for Indian language translation of the book, which he says is very important to take the message across.
“I look at India and I don't think life is easy for gay people,” Suvir said, reminiscing a letter he received from a gay man in a small town in Western Uttar Pradesh.
“As a gay man in a small town in India, this is as far as I will get to go. I don’t have a lover, I am scared to even look for one. Through your words, I travel the world. Through your words, I find peace,” Suvir quotes from the letter he received, saying both he and his mother had tears brimming in their eyes when they read it.
Suvir sums up succinctly: “I turned to my mother and told her, ‘This is why I write. Why I air my laundry. To help others realise they are not alone.’”
Tell My Mother I Like Boys
By Suvir Saran
Pages 220
Rs 699 (Hardbound)
Penguin Viking
