Review: In Free Fall by Mallika Sarabhai
The dancer, actor and choreographer’s memoir, which describes her adventures with a sense of irony and embraces her imperfections, will soften the critical gaze of those who believe that people born into privilege have no struggles
Dancer and actor Mallika Sarabhai, who shot to international fame with her portrayal of Draupadi in Peter Brook’s play The Mahabharata (1985), is out with an engrossing memoir titled In Free Fall: My Experiments with Living. In it, she discusses many aspects of her public and private life, seemingly at ease with the diverse reactions this might bring her. The candour is accompanied by introspection, grace, humour and intelligence. The book is a must-read for people who enjoy narratives by and about women who own their unconventional choices.
She auditioned for the role of Draupadi during her first pregnancy, and said yes to Brook soon after the offer was made knowing fully well that rehearsals would start in the very month that the baby was due. She travelled with her baby to Paris for the play when she spoke very little French. During the second pregnancy, she performed her show Shakti: The Power of Women till the end of the seventh month. “I danced, jumped off tables, portrayed Rani of Jhansi in robust Kalaripayattu, with the full blessings of my doctor,” she writes.
Thankfully, Sarabhai’s book is not a self-indulgent account by a celebrity preening for her fans. She describes her adventures with a sense of irony, and embraces her imperfections. She is not keen to set herself up as a role model for younger people, or point out how she is different from her contemporaries. She peels off the glamour and grounds herself in reality. She openly addresses conflicts within the family – her mother’s disapproval of her dependence on alcohol, her separation from her ex-husband, her son Revanta’s decision to leave the house to take care of his lonely father, her discomfort with her daughter Anahita’s choice to be with older women after she co-founded a group called QueerAbad.
Sarabhai writes, “Anahita and I stopped talking to each other. I could feel only hostility and disapproval when she was in the same room. Perhaps she felt the same. I felt I couldn’t breathe in my only safe space, my own home. Finally, things came to such an awful stage that I had to ask her to leave.” Her ex-husband tried hard to mediate. Sarabhai writes, “She denounced me, or what she felt I had become, as a mother. And moved in with her partner.”
This book also goes back to the time when Sarabhai was “suffering from both bulimia and anorexia”. Readers who are unfamiliar with these conditions will find the memoir educative. In her early twenties, when she was in love with a man from Kenya, she went there to visit him. When a lady serving food asked why she ate so little, Sarabhai confessed that she was terrified of putting on weight. The lady said, “Oh, then just do what I do. Eat as much as you like and then stick your fingers down your throat. All pleasure and no guilt or worry.”
The idea sounded repulsive at first but Sarabhai wanted to try it out, especially because she liked eating and a decade of diets had done nothing to help with her weight. She writes, “I started developing techniques to make the throwing up faster and more effective, finding muscles in my stomach that could push the food up more quickly.” What got her into trouble was the fact that her vomiting was loud. She had to face “quizzical, sometimes pitying looks, and deadly silence” from guests who invited her to dine. She stopped using the “inside outside technique” only after some exceedingly “cringeworthy dinner episodes” in New York high society that put her “at risk of being declared persona non grata in many homes.”
Sarabhai also writes about getting into the habit of smoking when she began to study at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. “By the late 1970s, I was smoking 40 cigarettes a day… I periodically thought of quitting; quit, and immediately put on weight,” she writes. The habit was not hidden from her family because she smoked at home in front of them. When she learnt about the well-established link between smoking and cancer, the author told herself that she would give up smoking a year before she wanted to get pregnant.
It is worth noting that these recollections in the book are devoid of any self-loathing. Sarabhai takes responsibility for the choices that she made back then, and the ones that she is making now. She is going to turn 70 next year. Her “experiments with living” have brought her in touch with what she needs to feel energetic, happy, and whole. She has explored homoeopathy, panchakarma, chromotherapy, yoga, pranayama, hypnosis, oil pulling, transcendental meditation, pranic healing, and nonviolent communication for her physical and mental health. She is far from squeamish. She writes not only about healing from grief, depression, a pituitary tumour and chikungunya, but also managing acne and constipation.
This book will hopefully soften the critical gaze of those who believe that people born into privilege have no struggles and must therefore be shamed for what they have. Sarabhai was raised in a reputed, well-to-do family and her parents knew important people all over the world, but none of that allowed her to escape the lessons that life wanted her to learn. She could not live in an ivory tower. She had to get real. As she remarks, “We must try and do everything we can to help nature in keeping our bodies and minds in a state of health…we must be prepared that it can all go for a toss because of a single virus, or gene or mosquito.”
Readers who have pets or are fond of animals will fall in love with the author. Apart from dedicating the book to a long list of “beloved four-legged friends”, Sarabhai writes, “A very important aspect of my wellness are my dogs.” She got her first dog, Freddie, to keep her son and her daughter occupied when she went on a tour but Freddie eventually became her “third child”. The number of dogs in her life has grown since then. She writes, “When I am fighting with the world, when everyone disapproves of me or what I am doing, their love and devotion is unwavering…They keep close if they feel I am sick or unhappy or in floods of tears; they know. They come and lick me to make me feel better. I can hold them and feel renewed.”
Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist and educator who tweets @chintanwriting
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