Nair’s Suitable journey

By Amit Roy

AS A SUITABLE BOY ended on the BBC on Monday (24), its director, Mira Nair, had a virtual lunch with the Financial Times (FT) from her “book-lined study in Manhat­tan’s Upper West Side”.

It is from here that she remotely completed edit­ing the six-part adaptation of Vikram Seth’s novel, “collaborating with col­leagues across the globe – the UK, Australia, Los Angeles, Budapest (where an orchestra has played the score) and India”.

The interview con­tained references to Nair’s second husband, “Indian-Ugandan aca­demic Mahmood Mam­dani, now a professor at Columbia University”; their son, Zohran K Mamdani, “who has just won the Democratic pri­mary for a New York state assembly seat, defeating a 10-year incumbent”; how she turned down the chance to direct the fourth Harry Potter mov­ie; and her plans to make a film about “one of the greatest modern artists of this world”, Amrita Sher- Gil, “a half-Hungarian, half-Indian painter who was famous in the inter­war years, then died trag­ically at the age of 28”.

Nair spoke of the com­plexity of Hindu-Muslim relationships that she had tried to put into A Suitable Boy: “I wanted to try to capture India’s beautiful intertwining that has always been our strength, but is now be­ing obliterated.”

She revealed what happened when she “tweeted enthusiastically about Lucknow’s new metro, where the map ro­tates between English, Hindi and Urdu”.

“I was so excited to see Urdu on a metro station,” Nair told the FT. “I took a picture of it and tweeted it. I said ‘Long Live Luc­know. My first Urdu on the metro!’ That is it. That is what I said. I was trolled by like 400 trolls saying, ‘Mira Nair loves the lan­guage of the invaders. Go back to Pakistan.’”