Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Brunch
AND THE ART OF LIVING
THE WRITER OF EAT PRAY LOVE OWNS IT ALL: HER HIGHS, HER LOWS, HER JOYS, HER SORROWS, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN. IN CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR SHUNALI KHULLAR SHROFF
some “catastrophe” preventing her from returning to the country that changed her life (as she wrote in Eat Pray Love). “Illness, death, and at one point even a lawsuit,” she says. Then she ran into her old hairstylist. “When she mentioned she was going to India in January to a women’s festival outside Jodhpur, I told her, ‘Oh, I’m going as well,’” Gilbert says. “She asked if I had been invited too. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just found about it right this second from you.’”
This is an enviable degree of spontaneous living, I tell her. She says she has always been this way. There is such an aura of easy calm about her that I am curious to know if she ever has moments of self-doubt or anxiety. “Oh! Let me tell you, every single day I wake up depressed, anxious, frightened and doubtful of shame, every day of my life. My first waking thought is panic, terror, dread, depression or anxiety.”
I cannot deny I am not a little surprised to hear this. Only a few minutes in her presence and you begin to worry that you will never be this cool. And then Gilbert tells you seriously that she starts her day at 5am to look this ‘put together’ by 10am.
That is the thing about her, she owns it all – her highs and her lows, her joys and her sorrows, and everything else in between – and this is what makes her who she is – a childlike woman with the soul of an ancient mystic. When you spend time listening to her, you walk away understanding life a little better.
I am keen to know how she anchors herself.
“I do a bunch of practices,” she says. “The first thing I do in the morning is hit my knees in desperate prayers: ‘Please help me through this day. Please help me navigate this mind. Please take away my character defects. Please bring me into faith. Please take these feelings away from me. Please help me.’”
Her morning ritual includes dancing and then meditation. I mention how restless I get when I meditate, and she prescribes dancing for me as well. “Tire yourself out a little. Be rid of that extra energy. Then meditate.”
GREYS, NOT BLUES
Our conversation is interrupted a few times by the hotel’s hospitality staff who need to discuss her schedule with her and get her to sign books for them. She listens to them intently, smiling warmly. This is what made me want to meet her again: the fact that she is intent upon forming a connection with the person in front of her. I ask her about it. “Why would I miss a chance to meet somebody?” she says. “But I balance it out. I spend a huge amount of time alone. I just came from spending 17 days in Goa without seeing anybody other than the waitresses. The older I grow, the more I enjoy my own company.”
While we are on the subject of growing older, I do the impolite thing of asking Gilbert what being 50 feels like.
“So happy to be 50. It takes a really long time to become a person. We’re born with no information, and you’re dropped into whatever the culture is, whatever your family is, whatever your gender is, whatever your obstacles are. And, you’re navigating this thing, led by people who don’t know how to navigate either. But, I feel like, ‘God, it’s so good now, finally!’”
Living in an ageist society as we do, most women are scared of ageing while Gilbert is cheerfully declaiming, she’s happy. This is unusual, isn’t it?
“I’ve never met any woman whose life hasn’t gotten better when she got older. I love hanging out with myself. I couldn’t bear my own company when I was 25.”
“Ageing is the greatest game in town. First of all, it’s so much better than the alternative; that is to die young. As so many people whom I love have. I had a friend who died of cancer when she was 32 and I remember her saying, ‘My greatest wish is to be alive and to age.’”