Confessions of a Closet Vegetarian

Relatively few Hindus know that there's an art to flipping hamburgers. When the burger hits the grill, you can't press too hard with the spatula, or the flattened burger will later poke un-aesthetically out of the bun. You have to flip it at just the right moment so the beef is imbued with a smoky flavor without removing its juiciness.

I am a Hindu who flipped burgers for a living all through college. I had grown up in a devout Hindu household in India, but when I came to America to attend Mount Holyoke College, like most undergraduates, I needed money. For the princely sum of $5 an hour, I worked at the college cafeteria, flipping burgers for the lunch line.

While interviewing for the job, I didn't tell my supervisor that not only was I a vegetarian who had never eaten a burger in my life but that eating beef was against my religion. What was the point of telling a ruddy, plump man surrounded by frozen beef patties about the sin associated with killing cows? Besides, I wouldn't have gotten the job.

So I wore white plastic gloves and tried to ignore the fact that the speckled brown patty on the grill was once a cow like those that villagers in India worshiped as Kamadhenu--the mythical "wish-cow" that granted anything a devotee wished for. When the smell of beef got too intense, I resorted to covering my face with a mask, telling my bewildered supervisor that I felt a cold coming on and didn't want to infect anybody. When I called my anxious parents to assure them that I had a job, I didn't tell them that I was flipping burgers. Instead, I vaguely murmured the words "cafeteria" and "lunch line." What was the point of telling my mother, who didn't even eat at restaurants that served meat, that her only daughter flipped hamburgers? She would have demanded that I return to India immediately and held elaborate purification ceremonies to rid me of my bad karma. Telling my parents that I was touching beef, albeit through white plastic gloves, would only make them conjure up images of the butcher shops in Madras, where meaty, red-veined carcasses caused passing Hindus to avert their eyes and mutter a prayer. Besides, the meat I touched was a sanitized slab that bore no resemblance to the organic shapes that dripped blood in those butcher shops.

As an immigrant Hindu, my life is full of such paradoxes. Frequently, I am confronted with images that ought to offend me, but the society I am in removes the context of that offense.

On another occasion, while I was on a business trip to Argentina, a wealthy Buenos Aires investor invited a group of us to his home for dinner. After cocktails and polite conversation, he proudly led the group to his backyard to show us what we were going to have for dinner. A whole cow was roasting over an open fire, dripping juices that made the fire crackle. My husband--also a vegetarian--and I glanced at each other and walked back into the house, covering our mouths with handkerchiefs. How does one inform a genial host that he has committed sacrilege? We did not.

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