CHENNAI: For someone who was fiercely private, not many know that J Jayalalithaa once wrote in detail to ‘clarify the truth of her life.’
“I never thought of writing about my life events, but in the last 2-and-a-half years as I wasn’t as visible in the public view, I started to hear a lot of rumors about me and felt really sad. So I thought it was the right time to clarify the truth about my life,” she wrote in a serialised memoir in the Tamil weekly – magazine, Kumudam.
The year was 1978, she was 30 years old, still a few years away from entering politics. Her film career was in a slump, movie offers had dried up. She was briefly estranged from her mentor and onscreen partner, MG Ramachandran.
After writing a few columns, she stopped, disclosing that it would compromise the privacy of people close to her, which led to speculation that MGR and she had reconciled.
Here, some excerpts from her writing:
“My house’s name is Vedha Nilayam, it is named after my mother’s name Vedha. She changed her name to Sandhya for the films later. My mother helped decide the carpets, curtains and everything else in the house but she never used it as she died before this house was built,” she wrote in one of her earliest columns.
The house she is referring to is the palatial bungalow she owned in Poes Garden, Chennai. It was where she lived right till she was hospitalized in September. After she died on Monday, it was where her body was brought for the night before being moved to a public hall for viewing.
