Anu Aggarwal

Anu Aggarwal was not a typical aspiring heroine. Educated and independent, she studied sociology and worked as a successful international model, walking ramps in Europe, before films came looking for her rather than the other way around.

That outsider quality — tall, striking, self-possessed — was part of what made her so distinctive when she finally faced a movie camera. She never seemed to be chasing stardom, which only made stardom chase her harder.

In 1990 she starred in Mahesh Bhatt's Aashiqui, opposite Rahul Roy. Carried by one of the best-selling soundtracks in Indian music history, the film became a phenomenon, and Anu — as Anu Verghese — became the romantic face of an entire generation of young Indians.

For a few years she was everywhere, one of the most talked-about actresses of the early 1990s, with films across Hindi and southern cinema, including Mani Ratnam's Thiruda Thiruda (1993) and the arthouse The Cloud Door. And then, at the peak of her fame, she began to lose interest in it.

Increasingly drawn to spirituality, Anu stepped back from mainstream cinema and spent time at an ashram, studying yoga and meditation. She was, by her own account, searching for something films could not give her.

Then, in 1999, came the moment that split her life in two: a horrific car accident. She suffered severe head injuries and fell into a coma that lasted 29 days. Doctors reportedly feared she would not survive, or would not recover her faculties if she did. The nation's onetime romantic icon lay unconscious, her future erased.

She survived. But she had to rebuild almost everything — her body, her memory, her sense of self — from the ground up, a slow and painful recovery she has described unflinchingly. The star of Aashiqui did not return to being a star.

Instead, Anu Aggarwal remade herself as a yoga teacher and author, founding work around yoga and healing and later publishing a candid memoir, Anusual, about fame, the accident and her spiritual life. Where most 'untold stories' end in tragedy, hers turns the other way: the crash that should have ended her became the beginning of a completely different life.