‘A Guide to Resolute Irresponsibility’

After a long time, today was a day which I enjoyed like no other, reading, imagining, soaking, sleeping and reading again. Day before, while browsing through the collection of the books in that newly discovered ‘pigeon-hole library’, I found myself staring at this seemingly harmless , pirated and decrepit copy of ‘ The memoirs of Protima Bedi’. On the cover page, beneath the stapled lamination, I found this black & white photograph of a middle aged lady, sporting a carefree laughter and a disproportionately huge red bindi.

As I browsed through the contents, I learnt that she was Kabir Bedi’s ex-wife, and something about her face said that she would be hugely controversial, and that this book would contain controversies replete with steamy sleaze with absolute strangers. I loved the idea and picked it up considering it to be a breezy read. And breezy it was, in more ways than one, the very first page contained graphic descriptions of how young Protima was raped by her cousin with his big paw under her panties!! But then the story changed, it became profound, and worse, I got sucked into the maelstrom of her life.

Her life story can easily fit in a paragraph. Born to a middle-class baniya family, she had always been a wild cat, stubborn, headstrong and eccentric. And thankfully, she was not a bong. Fell in love when she was 18, after some vain promises and a few hopeless tears she ran away from home and married Kabir Bedi while her boyfriend was away. Called her marriage ‘an open marriage’ and gave birth to her first child Pooja. Her marriage must have been a truly open one, as she didn’t know who had fathered her second child, Siddharth, a travelling guest or Kabir. Meanwhile Kabir exercised his share of openness while being busy with films. Walked out of this open formality and got divorced in her late 20’s. After having eloped with foreigners, musicians, politicians and lay-men alike and having loved each one of them passionately, she died under the crushing debris of a landslide, leaving behind a schizophrenic son who committed suicide, a divorced daughter and an unparallel legacy of an irresponsibly led life. She got fame as a model, a celebrity’s wife, a nudist, a talented dancer, an entrepreneur and finally a sanyasin. If I had the liberty to change the title of this book, I would call it – ‘A Guide to Resolute Irresponsibility’.

But I would still call it profound because it made me think, reflect and ponder. She wanted to be free, to explore, to go wherever her fancies took her and to do whatever her spirit demanded. She wrote with a lot of passion about the men in her life and how much she loved them all in the various phases of her life. To her, nothing was absolute, her body available to all, probably it was too good for any one individual to have! She forged relations with reckless abandon, she was the diva who shattered families including her own, with perfect harmony, her soul was true, unrestricted, unhindered, unshackled. Every third page of her memoir, right from her childhood to her final resting place under the landslide, she wept, mostly with her face buried under a pillow. The innocence of her memoirs is funny; I could only pity her helpless idiosyncrasies and all the men who came in her fold. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks predictable, disciplined lives are boring and that we should live for change.

But she had the mettle to be a genius, as exhibited by the mastery of odissi dance form, and the establishment of ‘Nrityagram’, a village dedicated to dance near Bangalore. But alas, she suffered excruciatingly in her life, mostly on account of her unhindered spirit. I painfully read through the section when she leaves her kids alone, devoid of a father, taking her flights of fancy. I actually felt avenged when her son committed suicide, she deserved every bit of the suffering, the remorse, for snatching the childhood from her kids and for all the families she had shattered.

Well, of all the biographies that I’ve read, this one would easily qualify as the funniest and the scariest. It kindled all insecurities that I harboured about women and matrimony. The aggression with which I seethed after reading her memoirs was purely a defensive measure to protect myself against such maniacs.