India, June 27 -- "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. The volume draws on private jottings: diary-like entries written in hotel rooms, on film sets, and during moments of rage, tenderness, doubt and despair. Readers who pick it up in search of a spiritual biography will be disappointed, perhaps usefully so, for in this story of "two vagabonds with no destination", UG is not presented as a guru. In fact, the book's deepest respect for him lies in its refusal to sanctify him. He is "the raging sage" in Bhatt's life, the man who offered no balm for the soul. UG, in a way, saved Bhatt by making comfort impossible. That is why the book begins, correctly, at the end: Vallecrosia, Italy, March 2007. UG is dying on a white sofa, stubbornly refusing hospitals, prayers and ritual. Bhatt stayed with him through those final days, watching a man who had refused every spiritual costume, raging against the theatre of dying. The Ashes Are Warm is affecting in parts because Bhatt does not pretend to have mastered the fire he writes about. It rejects the usual template of celebrity memoirs: I fell, therefore I rose; I broke, therefore I became whole. "This is not a memoir of achievement," the flap says; "it is the chronicle of an undoing." True to the avowed dictum, Bhatt returns, again and again, to the collapse of the self-image as husband, lover, filmmaker, seeker and storyteller. The book's emotional centre, however, is not only UG. It is also Parveen Babi. The pages on her are among the most devastating because Bhatt recounts events with rare candour. He remembers standing outside the morgue in January 2005, after her body had been found three days too late. Parveen Babi, who had once appeared on the cover of Time, had become, in death, what fame fears most: unclaimed, and exposed to the biological indifference of the body. Bhatt writes that he knows his life and career were inseparable from her suffering: "She cracked. I rose. / She drowned. I floated. / I owe her everything." The honesty is startling. It names the terrible imbalance by which art is often made. The loss of the woman he loved left Bhatt with material for a film, Arth. But the book is honest enough to admit that art uses pain, transforms it, sometimes profits from it, and is then haunted by it. The Ashes Are Warm is also moving because it understands grief without romanticising it. UG's sentence, "Life is pain. Don't ask me why it is so. It is so," becomes central to the book, which becomes a meditation on storytelling itself. Bhatt calls UG the "Story Buster", a man who saw stories as the anaesthesia human beings need because life can be unbearable. Bhatt built his life on stories. UG tore down the storyteller. The result is a fascinating tension that runs throughout: Bhatt knows stories are false, that cinema is the ultimate make-believe, but he also knows it is sometimes the only way a wound can speak. The reflections on his 1980s films Kaash, Saaransh, Arth and Janam are among the book's richest passages. Bhatt admits that many of the films he later made were choices made to earn a living. His return to truth, he suggests, came most powerfully in Zakhm (1998), born of his mixed heritage and the plural India he had grown up believing in. The book understands Zakhm as a wounded argument for the right to live by one's own creed. That thread gives the book its political undertow. India appears here as a civilisational argument that once allowed doubt to exist side by side with devotion. Sunita Pant Bansal's Afterword is especially sharp on this point. She sees in Bhatt's scribbles the fear of what happens when conversation is replaced by certainty. The lines at the beginning of this review may be the finest summary of the Bhatt-UG relationship. Light helps us see. Fire destroys what we think we are. Bhatt did not find a teacher who gave him a path. He found a blaze that made paths irrelevant....