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 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)