The Love Song Of Lisa R Ray

Accidental actor. Cancer ‘graduate’. Mother of multiples. These phrases cannot begin to encapsulate Lisa Rani Ray’s life and spirit. “risker of delight” – that’s the attitude she claims as her

- Primrose Monteiro-D’Souza

She was born to be a nomad. That is the first line of Lisa Ray’s memoir Close To The Bone. It seems fitting, seeing as she was born to parents who had defied cultural norms in their respective countries to build a new life in a third. Her childhood was spent equally in philosophical discussions with her intellectual father, more poet than engineer, from (then) Calcutta, India, and in the practicalities of a life close to the soil alongside her pragmatic mother from Poland in a modest home in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada. Her light green eyes are not inherited from her Polish mother Barbara Gallus, but from her father Salil Ray, who ‘dreamed’ his way out of India. Even though she loved her solitude and her Beatles songs (she knew all the lyrics by the age of five, wanted to marry John Lennon by nine), she dreamed of going to other places from a very young age. Like her father, whose “desire to see the world was stronger than the threat of becoming rootless,” she journeyed first through books and the names of capitals, and, then as she grew to young adulthood, looking to build a life of “coming and going as I pleased – for better or worse.”

“OUR LIVES ARE MYSTERIOUS MAPS…”