Anu-usual account

She begins her life’s story with just two words — Spring, 1987. Anu Aggarwal had come as a young girl to Mumbai, on a short holiday, before joining a German NGO in Delhi. And just like that it started, without any childhood episodes, without the long and descriptive teenage years. She calls it an autobiographical story, different from an autobiography, which she’d prefer to write in her grey and wrinkled years.

But life so far had given her a book to write, with the fame of a supermodel, the popularity of a filmstar, the peace of giving it all up, the cherished love of some, the jealousy of some others, and an accident that nearly killed her. Years have passed, but this was the time words sprang out of her and got written, she chose to call it Anusual, an epithet a journalist had once given her.

By just taking a cursory glance over one little paragraph you would instantly grasp that Anu is not a new writer. Words come out in a charming order, and sometimes appear to be just like diary entries. And you are not wrong in guessing that. “My stint with writing began at age 11 when I had learnt the nuances of how to keep a personal diary. Later, I realised how it actually helped me avoid a trip to the church and make a confession to the priest. Of the ‘Father I have sinned…. kind’,” she shares.

Anu reveals that her first influence came from her poet mother, who ‘counteracted life’s atrocities, the pain and the loss through writing about it’, who shared, confided and treated the pain creatively.  “Years later when I was hit by a nasty whack, got traumatised but miraculously saved — ‘write, write, write’ was a call from within. Even when it seemed nothing is possible, all is possible is what yoga affirmed.”

Her yoga years take a good part of the book. She calls her writing Zen style. But she has told tales of insults and jealousies. Names are, however, changed for the sake of privacy. Beneath the curt words is a tone of forgiveness, a mature resignation. She writes of the time she gave the doctor, who accidentally cut a nerve and paralysed her right arm, a gift to ease his grief. Those days, she writes, she lived out of her body than in it. Only, regrets have not made it into the book, but they’ve not made into her mind either. “What is bad? And good? One black, the other white. Are they not two opposite sides of the same coin, of life?” she asks.