Letter from James Ivory, Mumbai, India, to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, 1970 May 5 : typescript signed.

Explaining why he isn't certain that he is receiving all her letters; telling her why he hasn't invited her to come to more of the filming ("But I was never told by Ismail [Merchant] that you might come down again, or that you wanted to."); wondering when she would have been able to come; detailing the few shots that she would have been able to see even if she had come and his likely inability to have "even talked to you"; concluding that "you should be around for all the shooting I think, despite your feelings about it, and present at all the rushes. [...] But the one day trips in the middle of one of our horrible schedules, when it's just day to day survival - those don't help much"; asking her to help during the dubbing process; telling her that he hadn't realized that they weren't using Jennifer Kendal's "talent for comedy" until it was too late, adding that the role didn't give her much space for that; revising his previous assertion that the film might be slow-moving, "now that I've seen certain sequences cut together and joined up"; pledging to "never work with [Subrata Mitra] again," even though everything looks "marvelous"; reflecting on how Mitra's personality is similar to Merchant's and how his personality can grate against Merchant's; describing some clips of Shashi Kapoor acting with Rajshree that he has recently seen; wondering if they could include that in the film.