With a raconteur’s eye

A string of anecdotes that spans over eras, countries and moods, as quirkiness rules over chronology.

July 03, 2010 05:28 pm | Updated 05:28 pm IST

Luminous beauty: Leela Naidu

Luminous beauty: Leela Naidu

Beautiful women get used to having things their way. Extraordinarily beautiful women can simply make the rules up as they go along. Which is what the forever luminous Leela Naidu has done in a book that defies labels.

She recalls her diktat to co-author Jerry Pinto, “I told him that my book would have nothing to do with my life. ‘Then I said, ‘It's only about the funny anecdotes and the sad historic ones I came across'.”

The result is not an autobiography, an authorised biography or a memoir; this book is simply a string of anecdotes that weaves in and out of eras, countries and moods with the odd date strewn around as quirkiness rules over chronology. Naidu has the born raconteur's eye for the telling detail but simply bypasses large, important chunks of her life — her marriage to Tilak Raj ‘Tikki' Oberoi; the birth of her twins and, later, the death of one of them; and poet Dom Moraes' exit from their marriage, to name a few. And every so often, you will find an ‘oh-yes-and-there-is-also-this story' interjection in the middle of an anecdote.

Wondrous world

It would all seem rather whimsical if it weren't recounted with such a deliciously wry humour, an unerring sense of the absurd and a gentle humanity (“Violence to me is a lack of imagination. You cannot be violent to anyone if you can imagine what it would be like to be in that person's shoes.”).

The much-travelled and serendipitously connected Naidu takes us into a wondrous world in which a naked count shares space companionably with Mahatma Gandhi; where Jean Renoir and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala offer throwaway glimpses into their art, where Benito Mussolini makes an appearance and so does an early-day Naxalite; where Hrishikesh Mukherjee (who directed her in “Anuradha”) and Shyam Benegal (who directed her in “Trikaal”) play stellar roles, where JRD Tata (“Uncle Jeh” to Leela) approves the potty-training of village girl Munni for an Air India film, and Eugene Ionesco insists she translate an article he writes for a book edited by Moraes.

The names drop onto the pages faster than you can remember them; in less skilful hands, these inexhaustible tales of the famous could have palled. But Naidu (and, surely, Pinto) infuse them with a carefree grace — narrating her encounter with Salvador Dali which ended with the surrealist painter using her as a model for a Madonna, Naidu exits thus: “And somewhere in a mural in Spain, I became a holy mother too.”

Naidu, born to Indian scientist Dr. Ramaiah Naidu and French journalist Marthe Mange, straddled continents and cultures with an ease that helped her find her way through any situation, whether it was a royal do in France, where she signed mischievously as ‘Princess of Kuchh Nahin' or going down a shaft in the coal mines of Bihar.

In this book, the rich and famous share fair footage with the underprivileged and when they're thrown starkly together, as on a film set, it's clear where her sympathies lie. While film-makers like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Shyam Benegal (“…he was and is an honest man”) come off well, others don't quite.

Naidu, who worked on “Electric Moon”, directed by Pradip Kishen, is rather acidic about his wife, writer-activist Arundhati Roy: “There was very little of the caring Ms. Roy on the set of ‘Electric Moon'.” James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, who did “The Householder” with her, don't fare much better: “I wasn't quite sure whether either James or Ismail knew how things happen on a set.”

Life with Dom

But it is when talking about her years with Dom Moraes, who, she remarks, “lived under the misapprehension that anything could be improved by the addition of alcohol in good measure,” that see Naidu at her best. As his “unpaid secretary making endless notes and translating his mumbling questions to puzzled people across the globe,” she spins off tale after tale in which Moraes is often cast as the woolly-headed bumbler. Not the kindest of portrayals perhaps, but not without evident affection either.

If fault could be found, it would be that Naidu is prone to painting herself as alternately, the unfailing aesthete or the champion of the underprivileged. But then, she also makes light — very light — of Vogue's legendary anointing of her as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. “Beauty is one of the most subjective abstractions and standards change,” she points out.

As Pinto remarks in his touching, funny, besotted foreword, “She was that kind of lady.” An original. Just as this book is.

Leela: a Patchwork Life;Leela Naidu with Jerry Pinto, Penguin Viking, Rs 450.

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