Model and actor Lisa Ray on why she decided to write a no-holds-barred memoir instead of an account on dealing with cancer
Anjana Vaswani (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 19, 2019)

One afternoon, I was having coffee in a suburban five-star hotel coffee shop. I was sitting on my own, hiding in full view in a ripped t-shirt, my hair in disarray. I eavesdropped on a conversation between two young men at the table next to me. I could sense their curious glances out of my peripheral vision... ‘Hey, look at her. She’s not bad, huh’ [one of them said, in Hindi]. The other guy regarded me coolly and asserted, ‘She’s okay.’ He turned back to his friend, ‘But, she’s no Lisa Ray.’

This scene, which makes it into Lisa Ray’s memoir (to hit bookstores tomorrow), played out in the mid-1990s — an era marked by such brazen prudery and hypocrisy, that while kissing scenes were still deemed offensive in films, Ray, just a teenager, shot to fame when she wore a risqué red bathing suit and appeared on the cover of a glossy magazine, run by Maureen Wadia.

The exchange at the coffee shop amused her to no end then, as it does now. Looking back, Ray, now 47, believes it also captures how she felt at the time. “In my mind, the real me could never live up to the glamorous girl on the billboards… that me did not exist,” says Ray, who struggled with body image issues — which manifested in bulimia — while the world around her came to define her as a “sex symbol”.

Now, in a voice that’s startlingly honest, Ray tells her story in Close To The Bone (Harper Collins), a biography that she says has been in the works for 25 years. Sitting in the living room of her Bandra apartment, which is awash with sunlight, Ray appears calm and even has a spring in her step as though she’s recently been relieved of some weighty emotional baggage.

Ray’s is, after all, a journey of incredible highs and lows — from an accident which left her mother paralysed just as she was getting her first taste of success, to battling life-threatening cancer, which relapsed soon after her marriage in 2012, to last year, when she became a mother of twin girls via surrogacy.

Through it all, Ray says, she had been acutely aware that hers would be a story worth telling someday. “I have this unique ability to both be in a situation, and also watch as it unfolds,” she says. So, when she first put pen to paper, she had a trove of mental snapshots to rely on — “Distinct memories of the way someone moved their hands as they spoke, or the reflection on a glass picture frame…”

She also obsessively kept notes — she stowed away boxes and boxes of diaries, which she’s maintained since she was 14 or 15. The trips to Mumbai from Hong Kong, where she’s been living for the last four years, “helped me to draw on memories”, she says. “The sights and smells of Bandra would help take me back in time.”

The result is a powerful narrative, in which Ray has not just embraced her past, but made peace with it. What this book isn’t, however, is a story about her dealing with cancer — the book the publisher had originally commissioned her to write, based on her blog The Yellow Diaries, which chronicles her experiences with multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells, which she has been receiving treatment for since 2009.

“How could I write about the disease in isolation from the rest of my life, when I truly believe that its seeds were sowed earlier on,” says Ray. An old entry on her blog reads: “A few months ago my bone marrow started sending me messages…. The attempt to communicate probably started earlier. Time when I was ‘busy’. Building a career and impersonating myself… So I couldn’t hear my marrow gently carbonating. Trying to get my attention. Instead of tuning in to my body, I tuned out like a landlocked pirate tuning out the sounds of the sea.”

“I felt that I had to tell my story in its entirety, and fortunately the publishers were very supportive,” she says. A six month extension stretched into eight years. “Something prevented me from moving forward, and I realised I needed to digest my life first,” says Ray.

The manuscript she finally turned in, a day before the birth of her twins, Sufi and Soleil, in June 2018, is a beautifully written and deeply introspective account. Ray deftly weaves between a childhood spent in Canada and Kolkata, the influences her Polish mother and Bengali father had on her and the events that helped shape her life. The account is also audacious. Ray has opened up about her conflicted relationship with Wadia and other prominent celebrities, and also heaped the book with generous doses of deeply personal conversations and anecdotes.

For instance, Ray quotes designer James Ferreira who once told her: “I designed something these stupid Indians will not understand. I wish they would just open their eyes to beauty and stop being so conservative because everyone is sucking c**k anyway,” she writes. She has also candidly detailed her own indiscretions — an affair with a married man and when she lashed out at a watchman — but Ray thinks nothing of this. “I haven’t made anything up,” she says, comforting her 11-month-old daughter who has just woken from a nap.

“Besides, there is compassion at the core of my writing and I think that should smoothen out any rough edges. That, and the fact that a lot of these incidents happened 25 years ago,” she says. “Part of this has been about removing masks. Masks are sometimes necessary in the profession I am in, but I have always found it easiest to be truthful.”

Ray admits that her transformation is not quite complete yet. “I still have my days,” she says. “But, I am more comfortable in my skin now than I’ve ever been.”