A risktaker’s journey, half-told

After a quick read, at one go, of the confessions of a wandering soul — a first by a Bollywood personality — I had to consult Knots, the seminal work of the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing.

According to Laing, “Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.”

Anu Aggarwal has done just that. She’s the classic risk-taker. She explored mentalscapes at the cost of kicking stardom, cared a hoot about her obese bank account, and skedaddled from lovers who left her askance, wondering, “What’s love got to do with it ” Some could detect a schizophrenic streak in her. I can’t. I see a woman who didn’t play by the rules scripted by the self-centred males who treated her the way they would a clockwork doll.

Nope, she wouldn’t become their obscure object of desire, not at the expense of losing her identity. She couldn’t see herself as a submissive housewife or as a fluttering limelight moth. Intuitively, she resolved to do her own thing. She was restless, startled by the media rumours connecting her with bisexual escapades.

As she puts it, why would she She has no issues with same-gender sexuality, but come on. She wasn’t interested. She had enough problems with men, one of whom — a struggling musician — even insisted that she open a joint bank account. No way, she retorted, to the exploitative demand. Similarly, she waged a battle to retain an apartment whose landlord, with political connections, sought to deplete her wallet.

The actress who achieved instant recognition with Mahesh Bhatt’s Aashiqui (1990), discloses, “I caroused on a different wind — I never felt ‘close’ to a man I dated. There always was lurking some superior energy, call it ‘God’ or whatever, and I was ‘close’ to that. It was my retreat, my ‘sanctuary’ within.”

Taking off from there, she laundry lists the men who mattered to a degree, but transiently. An Anglo-Indian jazz musician, an American supermodel with an “unbelievable abs-body”, a Wall Street financier who was a devout follower of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, an Australian landowner double her age who wore chunky silver trinkets, a strongly perfumed French restaurateur and gallerist, a British owner of an architectural firm who had a kink about empty champagne bottles (whoa!).

And more: a venture capitalist-cum-harmonica player from Texas, a German lingerie-designer, an Iraqi spiritualist, a top honcho of Italy’s Fiat car company who would break into song and dance anywhere, and a tall Nigerian who liked “the most natural sex act to be performed with both of us standing up straight.”

If she had pleasant or unpleasant liaisons with Bollywood men, she dumps them in the closet. The laundry list features on pages 108-110 of the 184-pager. Indeed, the recap of those liaisons could whittle away from the memoir’s more insightful reflections, particularly those located in an ashram, at the tip of the Himalayas. That’s where Anu Aggarwal found a semblance of inner peace and, more importantly, her raison d’etre: to heal. Unbeknownst to many, she has brought comfort to many suffering from ailments, physical and mental, through the panacea of yoga much before the Y-word became trendy. Offering a chatai and basic exercises to start with, moving on then to a stricter regimen, she doesn’t operate out of a school. To those whom she cares for, be they strangers or acquaintances, she has brought relief, calmness and mental equanimity. And no, she doesn’t bring up her silent campaign-to-cure in the book.

Anu Aggarwal’s narrative about her prolonged stay in the ashram brings out her gratitude. The ashram was her sanatorium, close to trees, flowers and natural splendour, which she embraced as an infant would her mother. Gratifyingly, she doesn’t romanticise those ashram days, gently lamenting the politics of the place, where some disciples of the guru would seethe when she was favoured with a sliver of extra attention by the Swami. The frisson of sexual attraction between the Swami and his “favoured” disciple is retold with restraint.

Perhaps, hyper-sensitivity has been Anu Aggarwal’s weakness and strength as well. Once she worked with an NGO close to old Delhi’s Jumma Masjid mohalla. In Mumbai, she became a widely-wanted model, MTV veejay and then a reluctant star. Aashiqui was followed up with a mixed bag of films (Rakesh Roshan’s King Uncle, Sawan Kumar Tak’s Khalnayika, Mani Ratnam’s Thiruda Thiruda, Mani Kaul’s The Cloud Door). Why her mentor, the prolific Mahesh Bhatt, didn’t ever re-cast her remains a conundrum.

The model-turned-actress travelled the world over. The text about her jaunts reveals an abiding restlessness which culminated in a near-fatal accident. She obfuscates the events leading to a calamitous accident, close to Mumbai’s Chowpatty beach, with her alone at the wheel of a shattered Mercedes. The trauma she has kept to herself, presumably to numb the pain. It cannot be shared.

After languishing in a coma for 29 days at the Breach Candy hospital, she re-invented herself. She disappeared into anonymity seeking answers to self-doubts, which I suspect she has now come to terms with. At this moment, she isn’t about to jumpstart her career. Neither is she apologetic about her unpredictable decisions, which may have been tough on her parents whom she adores to pieces. All read and understood, Anu Aggarwal has changed, glad to receive the gift of life. Somebody up there likes her, and she knows that.

Since I’ve seen her in close-up during her peak days of stardom, I can say that the memoir is absorbing, brutally honest and, above all, self-deprecating. Sure, she frequently refers to her “Anusual” tawny complexion which set her apart from her peaches-and-cream contemporaries, her cascading hair and calf-like eyes. That’s because her looks were her calling card. Obviously, she wanted more than that. Which woman doesn’t

At the end of the read, I craved for more. Frankly, the editing leaves a world to be desired — at points the story appears to be jumpy and truncated. Moreover, a hardcover for the first edition was more than deserved.

Why cavil though Publishers and editors have their own take on what the reader will relate to. So be it. At the very least, Anu Aggarwal has recounted a few life-altering passages from her trek through relationships and show business. To be honest, a Part 2 would be in order. A journey half-told is half completed.

Khalid Mohamed is a journalist, film critic and film director