India, June 26 -- "I came asking for light. /I was given fire. / And in the fire, I disappeared. / What remains is not me. / What remains is the smoke of a self, undone, curling through the empty chambers of the heart," reads the Epilogue titled The Last Scripture in filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt's The Ashes Are Warm: Memories of a Lifetime Spent with UG Krishnamurti. In the book, Bhatt looks back on a life in cinema and in the public eye, with its accoutrements of success and love, and adjuncts of scandal, grief and notoriety.

In reliving the moments and milestones of his life, Bhatt sounds like a man sitting amid the remains of his own certainties and ruins, touching each burnt object once to acknowledge that it existed, and not necessarily t...