Copyright © 2021 by Purple Pebble America, LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Ballantine and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Photo credits are located on this page.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Songs of Universal, Inc., and SONY/ATV Music Publishing for permission to reprint lyrics from “I Believe”, words and music by Nick Jonas, Greg Kurstin and Maureen McDonald, copyright © 2019 SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC., NICK JONAS PUBLISHING, EMI APRIL MUSIC INC., KURSTIN MUSIC and MO ZELLA MO MUSIC. All Rights for NICK JONAS PUBLISHING Administered by SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC. All rights for EMI APRIL MUSIC INC., KURSTIN MUSIC and MO ZELLA MO MUSIC Administered by SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Hardback ISBN 9781984819215
Ebook ISBN 9781984819222
randomhousebooks.com
Ornament by iStock/alne
Cover design: Belina Huey
Cover photograph: Andrew Eccles
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Chapter 1: Monaco Biscuits and Ladakhi Tea
Chapter 2: Like Water
Chapter 3: Nomad
Chapter 4: Teen to Queen
Chapter 5: Top of the World
Chapter 6: Desi Girl
Chapter 7: Tinseltown
Chapter 8: Grief
Chapter 9: When You Know, You Know
Chapter 10: Shaadi
Chapter 11: Home
Photo Insert
Photo Credits
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PREFACE
I’M SITTING IN a meditative pose. In Sanskrit it’s called Sukhasana, or “Happy Pose.” Spine straight, shins crossed, shoulders pulled back, and chest pulled upward, I’m taking slow, focused breaths to bring all my attention to my center. The slow breathing calms my mind so that I can now tackle life’s challenges.
Kidding.
I am, in reality, likely sitting on the set of my latest film project, or on a plane, or slumped in a hair and makeup chair. My breathing is erratic from the four espresso shots I’ve inhaled in the past half hour while simultaneously wolfing down some form of comfort food that’s probably not the healthiest of options. (Doritos, anyone?) My overbooked schedule glares at me with seventeen emails that are marked Urgent! Requires Immediate Attention! And my phone is buzzing like a bumblebee on ecstasy. I am running on IST (Indian Stretchable Time)—I’m late—and I am in no frame of mind to make sense of my day, let alone my life.
How is this possible when I come from mystical India, the land of yoga, meditation, the Bhagavad Gita, and one of the most learned civilizations of the world? Why am I unable to invoke the infinite wisdom of my ancestors to calm my raging mind when so many people around the world have embraced the teachings of my great country and managed to incorporate its lessons of peace, love, and happiness quite effectively into their lives?
Well, I am a product of traditional India and its ancient wisdom, and modern India and its urban bustle. My upbringing was always an amalgamation of the two Indias, and, just as much, of East and West. My mom was a fan of Elvis and the Doors; my dad listened to Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar. My mom loves London, theater, art, and nightlife; my dad loved taking road trips through our subcontinent and sampling the street food at every opportunity. I lived in small towns in northern India for much of my childhood, and I also lived in the United States for three years in my teens.
Traditional and modern. East and West. There wasn’t necessarily a plan to raise me as a blend of those influences, but here I am, someone who calls both Mumbai and Los Angeles home, who works comfortably in India, America, and plenty of countries in between, and whose style and passion reflect that global mindset. The cultural mash-up invigorates me, is important to me, because I believe we can all learn from one another. That we all need to learn from one another.
Cue my husband, Nick. As I embark on this new chapter of life with him, it seems like a good time to take stock. It’s probably the first time as an adult that I’ve felt the desire to look back and reflect on how I’ve gotten to this moment. The first time since my life took a huge, crazy turn more than twenty years ago and I became a public person. Part of this desire to be introspective comes with maturity, no doubt. And I think it’s safe to say that part of it came along with Nick, a mature, introspective individual if ever there was one.
Looking back, I remember how I felt as my seventeen-year-old self, a small-town girl who exploded into India’s awareness back in January of 2000 when I was crowned Miss India World. I had no idea what to do with this unexpected widespread attention or how to prepare for what was next—representing my country on the global stage in the Miss World pageant. My family had no idea, either, because we weren’t a “pageant” family or an “entertainment” family. Far from it; my parents were both doctors. With their love, support, and encouragement, I decided that I would do my best to learn from each new situation I found myself in, to throw myself into it wholeheartedly and work as hard as I knew how. Sink or swim. And if there was a choice, I was always going to do my damnedest to swim. Admittedly, sometimes my strategy has been flawed or I’ve haven’t learned fast enough, but whatever my failures, they haven’t been for lack of effort.
I have always felt that life is a solitary journey, that we are each on a train, riding through our hours, our days, our years. We get on alone, we leave alone, and the decisions we make as we travel on the train are our responsibility alone. Along the way, different people—the family we are born to and the family we choose, the friends we meet, those we come to love and who come to love us—get on and off the cars of our train. We are travelers, always moving, always in flux, and so are our fellow passengers. Our time riding together is fleeting, but it’s everything—because the time together is what brings us love, joy, connection.
Which is why I’m so grateful to be right here, right now, reflecting with you on my unfinished journey. I hope that whatever I have learned along the way, from fellow passengers, from my efforts and my own mistakes, can contribute to your journey, too. Because as I have discovered, if you’re willing to be a student of life, the possibilities are endless.
Priyanka
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 nonobjective 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.”
&
nbsp; “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-year-old 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.
* * *
PRIOR TO MY brother’s pageantry subterfuge, I was planning on studying to become an aeronautical engineer. Medicine, academics, and military service were in our family’s DNA, and excelling academically was expected. Both of my parents were doctors in the Indian Army. My mother’s father was also a doctor, and her mother was a nursing student. My father was from a Punjabi Hindu family in Ambala, a city in northwestern India. His father, Kasturi Lal Chopra, was a subedar in the army—a junior commissioned officer—who fought in Burma, the Congo, and with the U.N. forces. My grandfather, or Pitaji, as we called him, was married to Champa Kali Chopra, and after leaving the service he started his own business providing supplies to the military. My father’s older brother, Vijay, joined the army at seventeen, and his two younger brothers, Pawan and Pradeep, skipped the military and joined their father in the family business of providing supplies to it. My father’s sisters, Saroj and Kamini, both younger, are women of uncommon graciousness and warmth.
My father chose a path slightly different from that of his father and brothers. He attended army medical school and upon graduation served, and practiced, in the military for twenty-seven years, eventually retiring as Lieutenant Colonel Ashok Chopra, MBBS, MS. (In India, a doctor specializing in surgery is awarded the MS degree—Master in Surgery—rather than the MD.)
While Dad was a dedicated army doctor, his actual life’s dream was to be a musician. Given that music and entertainment weren’t considered real career choices at that time, at least not in his very traditional middle-class family, he followed a more conventional course. Still, he remained a deeply creative person for all of his days. A singer with a magical voice, he was gregarious and loud, always laughing. If there was a crowd at a party, he was in the middle of it. If there was a show at the army club, he had no doubt been the one to organize, produce, host, and star in it.
My mother was more of an introvert. Born in Madras, now known as Chennai, and raised in the part of the eastern state of Bihar that is now called Jharkhand, she was also from a middle-class background. Her mother, my grandmother Madhu Jyotsna, was Christian (she was baptized Mary John) before she met and married my grandfather Manhar Krishna Akhouri, who was a Hindu. Her marriage outside her religion meant that she was shunned from the church she’d been raised in, and sadly, she remained an outsider even in death, when her final request to be buried with her family in the cemetery at her home church was denied. Both of my mother’s parents were also involved in local governance: my grandmother was the first female in her division to become a member of the Legislative Assembly in Bihar, and my grandfather was a trade union leader and served as a member of congress in Bihar.
On any given night of my childhood, the doors and windows of whatever home we were living in at the time would be open, the curtains swaying in the early-evening breeze and the smell of rose and jasmine floating in from the garden. There would be music, candles, and possibly a cocktail hour outdoors, after which we would eat together as a family. Throughout my childhood, my parents loved to entertain, and I adored watching them get ready to welcome guests on party nights. They knew how much I loved to be a part of any festivity, so they always made sure to include me. My mother even made me my own special hors d’oeuvres: Monaco biscuits—delicious salted crackers—topped with a small cube of cheese and a dab of ketchup or hot sauce. Bite-sized bits of heaven.
My mother was a combination of intellect and allure. As she would get ready to meet guests I would study her carefully applying her makeup, creams, and perfumes and then getting dressed for the evening. Her wardrobe was all color—chiffon saris in floral prints and solid hot pinks, bright oranges, deep reds, golden yellows. Her long, dark hair hung to her waist, and she usually wore it down in a braid or in a bun at the nape of her neck. I loved watching her put on her makeup—kajal to line her eyes, lipstick, and always a red bindi in the center of her forehead. I longed to be like her someday: elegant, eloquent, impeccably dressed, impossibly glamorous. She exuded quiet confidence and total competence—which, together with her natural sense of style, made her magnetic. Whether she was dressed in a French chiffon sari for work or in a pair of white bell-bottoms and big sunglasses on vacation, she was the epitome of beauty in my eyes.
Perhaps this is why as a child I loved playing with her makeup. She used to have to lock her dressing room to keep me out, but on those fantastic occasions when she forgot to, I was ready and waiting to pounce. Multiple times I was caught with my fingers inside her lipstick tubes, the red and pink contents smeared all over my face, kohl on my eyes, one of her beautiful saris wrapped around me. How mad she would get! But perhaps what I remember most was her perfume: Dior’s Poison. How she smelled of it, how her closet smelled of it, how whenever she walked she left a scent trail, invisible but unforgettable, in her wake.
On party nights, my father would dim the lights and put Kenny G on the stereo system—a double Akai cassette deck with big amplifiers, which my mother still has. Soon our house would be full of officers and their poshly dressed wives, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, singing. I would be dressed to the nines, too, sitting on everyone’s lap with my orange juice and my special crackers until I fell asleep and was carried up to bed. Another perfect night.
* * *
MY PARENTS MET in early 1981 in Bareilly, a small town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where my father, Major Dr. Ashok Chopra, was a general surgeon in the army, and my mother, Dr. Madhu Akhouri, was treating patients in Clara Swain Hospital. (This after leaving Jharkhand in order not to practice in the shadow of her physician father; the desire to be one’s own person runs deep in my family.) When my father first saw my mother at a party, gorgeous in a sari with her long hair down her back, he knew he had to figure out a way to see her again and ask her out on a proper date.
The next evening, he showed up unannounced at the hostel where my mother was living with her mother, who was acting as a chaperone for her unmarried daughter. The three chatted a bit, and my father returned
the following evening, again unannounced. It turned out that Mom was working a night shift.
What to do? My determined father paid a visit to Clara Swain Hospital and asked to see her—because what better way to engage the beautiful doctor than with an important medical puzzle to solve?
“I have a terrible stomachache. Very severe,” he said gravely.
She ruled out several possibilities, then gave him an intravenous painkiller. A few hours later he said he was greatly improved and he left, promising to visit the army hospital for further imaging.
Dad continued his speedy and miraculous recovery, and the next day he asked Mom if she would go on a date with him. Her mother refused to grant permission, so Dad tried again, this time taking along a married friend, who said she and her husband were having a small house party and my mother would be well looked after. My grandmother finally agreed.
At the party, during their third dance, Dad asked Mom if she would marry him.
Dumbfounded, she said she wasn’t ready to marry anyone yet.
“What will make you ready?” he asked.
“Some bell will ring somewhere that you’re the guy for me,” she said. For the next two dances he kept asking, “Did you hear the bells? Did you hear the bells?”
A couple of dates later, after they’d discussed the things they wanted in a marriage and the things they couldn’t tolerate, she realized that he was the one for her.
Mom told Dad he’d now have to get her father’s permission. After that was secured, Dad’s father met Mom’s father, and, in typical Indian-family fashion, the deal was done. What would become an amazing thirty-two-year marriage of equal partners began without the accepted traditions of an arranged marriage and a long engagement, as they married ten days later.
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