Leela

Vogue once named Leela Naidu one of the five most beautiful women in the world, but she was far more than a face. She appeared in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anuradha, Merchant-Ivory's The Householder and Shyam Benegal's Trikaal. Four times she refused to sign on to Raj Kapoor's films, and she asked for a bound script long before the idea became a Bollywood cliche. Jean Renoir taught her acting, and Salvador Dali used her as a model for a Madonna.

Her personal life moved just as fast. She was married, a mother of twins and divorced before she turned twenty. Later she became Dom Moraes's muse, unpaid secretary and best friend, and she translated for him when he interviewed Indira Gandhi. Over the years she also edited magazines, dubbed Hong Kong action films and was Kumar Shahani's first producer. When JRD Tata wanted a film on using the washroom on a plane, she made it.

This memoir, titled A Patchwork Life in the source text and written with Jerry Pinto, is charming and idiosyncratic. It opens onto a world of Chopin, red elephants, lampshades made of human skin and moss gardens, where a naked Russian count turns up in a French garden, grand hotels offer porcupine quills as toothpicks and an assistant director sends his leading lady an inflatable rubber bra.

Naidu's guiding idea was to stay in the moment. Plenty of people who knew her have a story about her, and here she tells hers.