RAY FINDS RHYTHM

Lisa Rani Ray talks about her early days in showbiz, her cancer years, her code for a healthy life, motherhood and her new role as an art curator

- PUJA AWASTHI

To start at the beginning is a good point. And, in her own words, in her deeply engrossing, almost lyrical memoir (Close to the Bone), Lisa Rani Ray chooses the moment of her difficult birth. As the umbilical cord tightened around her neck, cutting off oxygen supply, she displayed such tenacity for life that even the nurses could not help but remark upon it.

That set the template for a life that could skid out of control, despite the strongest safety nets. It pushed Ray on a path to unravel and reconcile in herself the many contradictions that included the tussle between poetry and pragmatism that came from her Bengali and Polish bloodlines.

In the early 1990s, when Ray burst on the Indian entertainment scene, she was, in her own words, "a poster child". Her focus was on looking good, no matter how wretched her insides were. She remembers being on a film set, running a temperature and being jabbed so that she could complete the shoot. She remembers suffering from body dysmorphia. That beauty with the piercing eyes-forever frozen as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's 'Aafreen' (blessing)-thinking she was any less than perfect is an unimaginable stretch of imagination. But so it was.

Those days are long gone. And Ray couldn't be happier. On her Instagram profile, her often-used hashtag is #52andthriving.

"I finally have come to a place in my life... where I have understood the only thing that will last, that will keep me healthy, fit... in body, spirit and mind, because I believe that there is a connection between all three... is sustainable health and wellness," she says.

For someone who hated going to the gym since she started it at age 16, Ray's measures of beauty were always external gratification.