The book, UNFINISHED: A Memoir, by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, has been described as a collection of personal essays, stories and observations. Below is an excerpt of the first chapter, Monoca Biscuits and Ladakhi Tea

Oh, look at the moon,

She is shining up there;

Oh! Mother, she looks

Like a lamp in the air…

ELIZA LEE FOLLEN

AS A CHILD, I never dreamed I’d be in the movies. Or be a beauty queen. Or a fashion meme. I never dreamed I’d be in any sort of limelight. When I was little, no one ever looked at me and predicted, “She’s going to be famous, that one.” (Well, my completely non-objective father might have said that.) No, the journey toward my life in the public eye began in 1999 when I was seventeen and my ten-year-old brother had a brainstorm.

“Mom,” he said, walking into our parents’ spacious bedroom one cool evening while I was in my room studying.

“Is Didi seventeen?” He used the affectionate term for “older sister” as he always did.

“Yes,” our mother replied.

“Is she taller than five foot seven?” “Well, she’s five foot seven.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Sure.” I imagine my mother smiling as she wondered what Siddharth was getting at.

“Why don’t you send this in for her?”

Sid held out a copy of Femina magazine, opened to a page with a call for submissions to the Miss India competition.

Mom didn’t immediately agree to the plan, but Sid insisted.

As fate would have it, I’d just had professional photographs taken for a scholarship program I’d wanted to apply for — my first professional photos ever — and he handed them to her.

Then when my mother pointed out that a full-length photo was also required, he found one of me all dressed up at a recent birthday party and cut the other people out of it.

To quiet her persistent son and with no expectation that anything would come of it, Mom finally filled out the application and they sent it and the photographs off the next day without telling Dad — and without bothering to mention anything to me. And that was how my public journey, and my career, began.

Thanks, Sid.

Sid now says that he pushed Mom to send in the application because when I’d moved back home about a year earlier after living with relatives and going to school in the U.S., he’d gotten kicked out of his room.

There were only two bedrooms upstairs, and since he was a ten-yearold boy and I was a seventeen-year-old girl, Dad decided the second bedroom should be mine.

Naturally, I didn’t argue. Mom made my brother a new “bedroom” in the upstairs hallway between my parents’ room and mine. (Or his, as he would call it.) She put a bed there, and a little wardrobe closet, and a table. Then she tried to spin the move as a good thing for him, but he didn’t fall for it.

“This is a hallway, it’s not a room!” he pointed out, loudly. And this, apparently, was why he’d told Mom to enter me into the Miss India pageant. He wanted his room back, and it was a way to get me out of the house. Perfectly logical, my brother, Siddharth. Eventually, he got his room back.

The book was published by Penguin Random House UK and it will be available in South Africa around mid-March, for R450.