Lisa Ray: My entire career is an accident. It’s pure serendipity

By her own admission, Lisa Ray is an accidental actor. Born in Canada to a Polish mother and a Bengali father, the spotlight found her serendipitously while she was vacationing in India. It was the start of a successful acting and modelling career. But Ray, who played the lead in Deepa Mehta’s critically acclaimed film Water , had to contend with another unforeseen spin in fortunes.

In 2009, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and potentially fatal cancer of white blood cells. She began chronicling her experience with the disease in her blog, The Yellow Diaries. After a stem cell transplant, she announced in 2010 that she was cancer-free.

Ray (47) is now out with her memoir Close to the Bone , a granular, richly descriptive account of a life and its accompaniments. She writes, “In me, there is a converging of not just two different cultures and bloodlines, but two varying approaches to life, the pragmatic and poetic.”

Edited excerpts from an e-mail interview with BL ink .

Memoirs are not easy to write. What was it like for you to write Close to the Bone ?

I do agree that it’s a bit of an overwhelming task if you consider it deeply, but fortunately I did not realise what I was embarking on. But as a natural observer of life, I had accumulated a lifetime of notebooks and vignettes of things seen and experienced and heard. I have been drawn to writing my whole life, and in fact I have been writing articles in India for a while now, quietly, without fanfare. The opportunity to write my memoir came up and I leveraged it as an opportunity for launching my writing career.

Close to the Bone; Lisa Ray; HarperCollins India; Non-fiction; ₹599

Close to the Bone has taken years. The quality of telling my story has been as important as the story itself and I’ve laboured over sentences, sometimes for many days. I take notes, I need to reflect and immerse myself in a mental geography before writing.

Your book is as much a memoir as it is a travelogue, almost a geographical account of health and healing. Could you describe what journeys represent to you?

My journeys — both the inner and outer — have taken on a quality of questing. Embedded in them is an effort to reveal, unmask, celebrate, terrify and connect... In a practical sense, the mountains draw me the most. I have a special connection with all mountains but particularly with the Dhauladhar range in Himachal Pradesh. Today I’m drawn to nature, stillness, purity. Having said that, I can make a life for myself anywhere in the world. I’ve transitioned to a place where I carry my sense of peace and home inside. I’ve returned to taking my desires and longings and translating them into words. The journey towards joy and self-acceptance, that’s a powerful journey.

Do you find that there is a greater willingness to publicly discuss issues such as cancer? Consequently, what impact has it had on people battling cancer and other illnesses that were deemed fatal and incurable?

It’s an incredibly positive and encouraging trend. I believe anything that is deemed taboo or is purposefully unspoken of or suppressed exerts a sort of power over you. Bringing these topics out of the shadows means creating trust and looking them in the eye, which reduces their power. We need to speak openly about cancer in India again and again as there is so much misinformation about the disease. I spend a lot of time giving talks across India but I want to emphasise Close to the Bone is NOT a cancer memoir. I plan to write more specifically about my healing journey from cancer, but this book is not that.

You have poignantly captured the ordeals of trying to cope with the egregiously sexist standards of the film industry while dealing with a recuperating body. How do you view those standards today?

My entire career is an accident. It’s pure serendipity and I never aspired to be a model or in the film industry. I am still very ambivalent about my career in front of the camera. This is an important aspect of my personal story and history. But the double standards inherent in the industry are something I don’t take personally anymore — it was important to heal myself and then approach the misogynistic mindset from a balanced mind. I think we are making positive strides forward in tackling these enduring problems in India, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

To paraphrase a line from your book — life is always altering without warning. What keeps you going?

I wrote that my essential philosophy derives from a place where I believe life is for me — not against me. The times are troubled perhaps, but troubled times have come before. What is essential is to work on your own awareness and consciousness and wisdom before anything else. My life is a celebration of all the shades — both dark and light. I embrace the experiential aspect of life — I don’t deem anything wrong or tragic per se. So rather than becoming a victim, I think each of us has to take personal responsibility for how we walk on this planet, what we contribute and how we can spin gold from our stories.

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