<p>Moon beams and precious crystal. Leela Naidu reminded you of both. And of Indu repressed by a manipulative matriarch in The Householder. And Anuradha, falling in love with Balaraj Sahni over a sprained ankle and then losing her sparkle one wistful smile at a time. Of the proverbial slipping on thin ice in Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke. And of Dona Maria Souza-Soares in Trikaal. Despite her clipped accent, she was instantly arresting. But her face was not meant for commonplace adoration. She was Salvador Dali’s Madonna. Hand picked by Vogue as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. Someone who turned down Raj Kapoor’s “perfume scented politesse” and a four film contract. She could have been Dr Zhivago’s Tonya if David Lean had waited a few minutes longer to post a letter to Geraldine Chaplin, his second choice. Born to over achieving, enlightened, widely-travelled parents of two different nationalities, Dr Ramaiah Naidu and Marthe Mange, Leela, despite occasional encounters with racism, grew up as a privileged child enjoying Bharatnatyam, Chopin, ballet and meeting and greeting a certain ‘Mickey Mouse’ in her out-house, who incidentally turned out to be Mahatma Gandhi. And there was Sarojini Naidu, “a beloved aunt, so large that she could not fit easily in most of our chairs.”<br /><br />Leela was Jean Renoir’s protégé and once had Cartier, “jeweller to the world” reassemble pearls that had fallen from her neck. For free. She was that kind of a woman. And the kind who would write a book like the Leela-A Patchwork life (written by Naidu with Jerry Pinto) where opinions, unaffected by emotion, gleam like cultured pearls and life is an exercise in remembering as well as forgetting. The book just skims the surface of her failed marriages to Tilak Raj Oberoi to whom she lost the custody of her twin daughters and to the mercurial Dom Moraes but reveals no desire to either demonise them or to romanticise her own devastation. We do know however that she survived and without bitterness though the death of her daughter was a blow she possibly never recovered from fully.<br /><br />At various points of her life Naidu went behind the camera, wrote scripts, edited magazines and for a long time, seemed poised for breathtaking success but somehow missed it. Either because she was willfully dismissive of fame or because her emotional choices overwhelmed her creative life. Fame was an amusing diversion for her and she refused to be played either by actors who made passes at her or by directors who thought that someone as incongruously pure as her had to wear false eye lashes and inflatable ‘baggies’ to appear voluptuous. She asked for bound scripts, stood up for injured spot boys and asked for chairs so that the invisible ‘extras’ could sit down. She remained unimpressed by ambitious men like Ismail Merchant who wore “blinkers that could even blot out human tragedy around him’’ and shows a fetching air of superciliousness as she dismisses Sunil Dutt as a limited actor without seeming to notice that she herself was a misfit in Hindi cinema. Yet Naidu remains immensely likable as she spurns many life changing opportunities to do unlikely things like marrying men she could not rescue from themselves, dubbing Chinese films, taking on a racist boss at a TV station in Hong Kong and confronting four menacing tractors of the land mafia in Delhi, alone and in the middle of the night, for the sake of a maid about to lose her home. And when she found a decapitated body during her search for an alternative site for the displaced settlers, she did not squeal and run but told the tehsildar, imperiously, “Find his head.” Naidu looked like a hot house orchid but there was steel under the silk. There is humour rather than malice in the way she quietly chuckles at the sight of a Naxal leader courting a BBC camera and at Arundhati Roy whom she met on the sets of Electric Moon.<br /><br />Ms Roy thought Naidu was “too glamourous’’ and wanted her lips to be made into a square even as dancers going without lunch, chairs and even shade during a long sequence, provoked no response. Naidu recounts with some amount of relish, “There was very little of the caring Ms Roy on the sets of Electric Moon.’’ During a fire on the sets when an electrician got injured, she found, “Arundhati weeping on Pradip’s (Kishen) shoulder. She was worried about her stuffed animals.’’<br /><br />The book finally is not a narrative but a recollection of a life that strangely and inexplicably, did not turn out to be the fairy tale it was supposed to be. Though there were “seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’’ snatches of things Naidu wants to remember like a pom-pom jumper knitted by a kind watchman. The slim ankles of her mother engulfed by flames in a crematorium. Daughters she always saw from “behind a glass pane.’’ Great joy and that “great pool of grief within.’’ And “tears for the world. The wars. The children. The hunger. The disease.’’ The book like Leela herself refuses to jump through</p>.<p> hoops, steers clear of clichés and is inviolably unique. And it leaves us with the memory of a smile that tentatively hinted at the mysteries of life but never articulated them fully.</p>.<p><em>Leela: A</em><em> patchwork life<br /></em><em>Leela Naidu with Jerry Pinto<br />Penguin, 2010, <br />pp180, Rs 450</em> </p>
<p>Moon beams and precious crystal. Leela Naidu reminded you of both. And of Indu repressed by a manipulative matriarch in The Householder. And Anuradha, falling in love with Balaraj Sahni over a sprained ankle and then losing her sparkle one wistful smile at a time. Of the proverbial slipping on thin ice in Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke. And of Dona Maria Souza-Soares in Trikaal. Despite her clipped accent, she was instantly arresting. But her face was not meant for commonplace adoration. She was Salvador Dali’s Madonna. Hand picked by Vogue as one of the five most beautiful women in the world. Someone who turned down Raj Kapoor’s “perfume scented politesse” and a four film contract. She could have been Dr Zhivago’s Tonya if David Lean had waited a few minutes longer to post a letter to Geraldine Chaplin, his second choice. Born to over achieving, enlightened, widely-travelled parents of two different nationalities, Dr Ramaiah Naidu and Marthe Mange, Leela, despite occasional encounters with racism, grew up as a privileged child enjoying Bharatnatyam, Chopin, ballet and meeting and greeting a certain ‘Mickey Mouse’ in her out-house, who incidentally turned out to be Mahatma Gandhi. And there was Sarojini Naidu, “a beloved aunt, so large that she could not fit easily in most of our chairs.”<br /><br />Leela was Jean Renoir’s protégé and once had Cartier, “jeweller to the world” reassemble pearls that had fallen from her neck. For free. She was that kind of a woman. And the kind who would write a book like the Leela-A Patchwork life (written by Naidu with Jerry Pinto) where opinions, unaffected by emotion, gleam like cultured pearls and life is an exercise in remembering as well as forgetting. The book just skims the surface of her failed marriages to Tilak Raj Oberoi to whom she lost the custody of her twin daughters and to the mercurial Dom Moraes but reveals no desire to either demonise them or to romanticise her own devastation. We do know however that she survived and without bitterness though the death of her daughter was a blow she possibly never recovered from fully.<br /><br />At various points of her life Naidu went behind the camera, wrote scripts, edited magazines and for a long time, seemed poised for breathtaking success but somehow missed it. Either because she was willfully dismissive of fame or because her emotional choices overwhelmed her creative life. Fame was an amusing diversion for her and she refused to be played either by actors who made passes at her or by directors who thought that someone as incongruously pure as her had to wear false eye lashes and inflatable ‘baggies’ to appear voluptuous. She asked for bound scripts, stood up for injured spot boys and asked for chairs so that the invisible ‘extras’ could sit down. She remained unimpressed by ambitious men like Ismail Merchant who wore “blinkers that could even blot out human tragedy around him’’ and shows a fetching air of superciliousness as she dismisses Sunil Dutt as a limited actor without seeming to notice that she herself was a misfit in Hindi cinema. Yet Naidu remains immensely likable as she spurns many life changing opportunities to do unlikely things like marrying men she could not rescue from themselves, dubbing Chinese films, taking on a racist boss at a TV station in Hong Kong and confronting four menacing tractors of the land mafia in Delhi, alone and in the middle of the night, for the sake of a maid about to lose her home. And when she found a decapitated body during her search for an alternative site for the displaced settlers, she did not squeal and run but told the tehsildar, imperiously, “Find his head.” Naidu looked like a hot house orchid but there was steel under the silk. There is humour rather than malice in the way she quietly chuckles at the sight of a Naxal leader courting a BBC camera and at Arundhati Roy whom she met on the sets of Electric Moon.<br /><br />Ms Roy thought Naidu was “too glamourous’’ and wanted her lips to be made into a square even as dancers going without lunch, chairs and even shade during a long sequence, provoked no response. Naidu recounts with some amount of relish, “There was very little of the caring Ms Roy on the sets of Electric Moon.’’ During a fire on the sets when an electrician got injured, she found, “Arundhati weeping on Pradip’s (Kishen) shoulder. She was worried about her stuffed animals.’’<br /><br />The book finally is not a narrative but a recollection of a life that strangely and inexplicably, did not turn out to be the fairy tale it was supposed to be. Though there were “seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness,’’ snatches of things Naidu wants to remember like a pom-pom jumper knitted by a kind watchman. The slim ankles of her mother engulfed by flames in a crematorium. Daughters she always saw from “behind a glass pane.’’ Great joy and that “great pool of grief within.’’ And “tears for the world. The wars. The children. The hunger. The disease.’’ The book like Leela herself refuses to jump through</p>.<p> hoops, steers clear of clichés and is inviolably unique. And it leaves us with the memory of a smile that tentatively hinted at the mysteries of life but never articulated them fully.</p>.<p><em>Leela: A</em><em> patchwork life<br /></em><em>Leela Naidu with Jerry Pinto<br />Penguin, 2010, <br />pp180, Rs 450</em> </p>
