BEHIND THE VEIL

Ila Arun, who has just published her autobiography, is not ready to bring the curtain down on her storied career as an actor and singer

- Devarsi Ghosh

TThe most impressive aspect of Ila Arun's self-assessment as an author must be that she knows she has style.

"All paintings can have the sun, the moon, clouds and trees," the 70-year-old multihyphenate explains. "But S.H. Raza is immediately identified as S.H. Raza because of what he does with the black dot. It's the same for M.F. Husain or Anjolie Ela Menon. Everybody has a lot to say. But the question is how are you saying it? How will you use flashforward or flashback? What memory will another memory open into?"

Throughout her newly published autobiography, Parde ke Peechhey, cowritten with her theatre colleague Anjula Bedi, Arun slips into fantasies, daydreaming and intricate detailing within her memories, occasionally sprinkled with quotes plucked from practically anywhere: Shakespeare, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Native American Hopis and the Chinese.

"There is an Ila Arun in everything I write," she says. "The pen and I are not new."

While widely known for her Rajasthani folk singing, smartly used in pop hits like 'Choli Ke Peeche' from the 1993 Hindi blockbuster Khalnayak, as well as her roles in films like Jodha Akbar (2008), Arun has constantly been writing her own lyrics, original plays, and even adapting multiple works by the playwright Henrik Ibsen into Hindi.