Letter from James Ivory, Mumbai, India, to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, 1970 May 20 : typescript signed with autograph annotations and corrections.

Updating Ruth about his sister, who had recently been in the hospital; pondering whether this hospitalization will affect her ability to retain custody of her children; wondering why Ismail Merchant is still in New York ("He was complaining about it, but still he's there. For what? Does it have anything to do with us, or with me?"); thanking her for telling him about "how you blithely tried to throw away our four lakhs of rupees" and asking her not to do "anything like that again"; expressing concerns about getting the film "intact out of the country [...] We must not show it to the censor board until the negative is safely out"; speculating about the scenes to which the censors will object; describing what they agreed to in order to shoot in Elephanta, including putting down a deposit ("I wonder if we'll get that deposit back. Probably not."); asking for her help to discuss the censorship issue with Merchant; providing his opinion about the middle of the film as it stands, which he thinks is "most fearfully clotted and heavy", and about a particular part of scene 13; asking her on Merchant's behalf to write two or three paragraphs about the film for potential viewers; asking her to also edit the synopsis of the film and send it to Merchant when she is done; relaying what "David" (David Gladwell?) has told him about "Subrata's murmuring ladies" who are staying at Windsor House, David's plans to take "Sheila" out and David's concerns about whether he should ask Mitra's permission first; wondering where the couple might be able to go where they will be able to be heard, as "I cannot imagine two more laconic persons"; telling her that he's not sure what he'll write for London Magazine and that Shashi Kapoor and Jennifer Kendal are away from the city; adding that he "doesn't know any collectors or spend time with them, with one exception - Cary Welch. But that's--or he--is in a special class"; naming a few people he also knows but does not consider to be collectors; naming a few other people who have "a symbolic value for me", including Honor(?) Seligman and Lillian and Peter Reilly.