Tales of the bold and the beautiful
Thoughtful, brave, full of insights about life, occasionally naïve, and utterly honest, Kabir Bedi’s memoir is unlike anything you would expect from a Bollywood personality. But then Bedi has always been different from the other stars of his generation, the Amitabh Bachchans, the Shatrughan Sinhas, the Jitendras etcetera, who clung to bourgeois respectability even when the gossip magazines hinted at lurid escapades.
Bedi was a member of the “bohemian Juhu gang” in the 1970s that included Shekhar Kapur, Mahesh Bhatt, Danny Denzongpa, Parveen Babi, Shabana Azmi, Parikshit Sahni and
Jalal Agha, among others. He was in an open marriage with Protima, who gained great notoriety in that sepia pre-internet, pre-social-media age by being photographed streaking, ie running nude, on — depending on the version you read — a Goa beach or the busy street in front of Jehangir Art Gallery in south Bombay. Finally, after all these decades, gossip mongers of a certain vintage will be happy to learn that it was a publicity stunt for the launch of Cine Blitz magazine. Protima Bedi, the model and socialite who doubtless would have been the queen of Insta influencers today, later became an Odissi exponent and set up Nrityagram, a dance school outside Bengaluru. But all that was after much heartache that came from experimenting with an unconventional marital arrangement. Indeed, the section of Stories I Must Tell that deals with the relationship reminded this reader of John Irving’s The 158Pound Marriage (1974).
Kabir Bedi famously left his wife for Parveen Babi who, like Meena Kumari, Guru Dutt, and lately Sushant Singh Rajput, forms a part of Bollywood’s tragic tableau of stars who shone so bright they consumed themselves. While Protima’s own book, Timepass: The Memoirs of Protima Bedi (1999), which appeared posthumously, has a different view of Babi, and the end of her marriage, Stories… reveals a young man wracked by guilt at leaving the family unit but going ahead because of his need for emotional safety: I had chosen intimacy, love and fidelity. At the time, it was what I needed the most. Parveen symbolised it.
Kabir Bedi’s success in Italy, where Sandokan (1976) made him a superstar, put a strain on his relationship with Babi who, from this account, seems to have already begun
Kabir Bedi
311pp, ~699, Westland the slide that ended in her lonely death in 2005, when “Her body was found in her Juhu flat four days after she died, a leg rotted by gangrene, a wheelchair by her bed.”
Followers of filmi gossip will focus on the multiple marriages and stories of infidelity but Stories I Must Tell is much more than that. It features great sketches of Bedi’s remarkable parents — his “auburn-haired English mother Freda”, who became an influential Buddhist nun known as Gelongma Karma Kechog Palmo, and his father Baba who became a philosopher in Italy — and offers glimpses of the politics of newly independent India and the turmoil in Kashmir.
Indian readers will be fascinated by the unusual (for us) frankness about sexual relationships and tales of struggle and success in Hollywood and Europe, but it is the section on the suicide of Bedi’s brilliant schizophrenic son Siddharth that reveals the man’s vulnerable saddened core. It is difficult to read and must have taken vast reserves of emotional strength to write.
The memoir is a tricky form and film stars who attempt it risk coming across as selfobsessed liars intent on whitewashing their pasts. That is not the case with this book, which is sometimes painfully honest. In a conversation with this reviewer on the Books & Authors podcast (on www.htsmartcast.com) Kabir Bedi said one of the reasons he wrote it was so young people could learn from his experiences, and avoid making similar mistakes. Given that every person traverses an individual path and has to learn his own lessons on love and life, this seems unlikely. Still, the reader might never succeed in dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous romantic fortune but he will definitely understand that it takes a brave man to be this forthright. An immensely readable account of a life touched by fame, adventure, much love and deep sorrow too, Stories I Must Tell marks Kabir Bedi out as a true original.