Letter from James Ivory, New York, New York, to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, 1970 December 15 : typescript signed, with postscript in ink.

Saying he had a dream in which she asked him what he would do next, and he said he'd like to do "that Indian Madame Bovary with Madhur"; then, after she frowned in a matter-of-fact way, he suggested her story "The Man with the Dog"; saying she'll be interested to know that "the Church Lands are now more than thirteen thousand acres, earning about six hundred a year under my stewardship"; saying that, because Shankar-Jaikishan and Usha Iyer got them into censorship problems with their song, they should help get them out of it; saying Ismail got furious at that idea; saying it's "not that easy to just 'dub' something in"; saying that means either the film has to be cut whenever "Hari Om Tatsut [sic]" plays, or Usha needs to compose new lyrics, Jaikishan needs to rerecord the song, they need to make new prints, and then they need to be shipped to Shashi so he can cut it in the right place; saying this is too time consuming and expensive; saying Joe continues to "be noble in his defeat and loss, without bitterness" and that he has resigned as the president of the Vantex corporation; saying the film [i.e. Bombay Talkie] closes tonight after a four-week run; saying this is just the first run in New York, and there will be first runs in many other cities; saying he is taking his friend Hedda Stern [possibly the Romanian-born American artist Hedda Sterne] to the last performance; saying he is flying to California for Christmas and staying until early January; saying he has a lot to tell her about the period after he arrived in England, before he returned to New York; in a postscript, saying he bumped into Lillian [Ross] and suggested she see the film, which she agreed to do, and when he said he had something else important to tell her, which was that Lindsay Anderson was in New York and she should interview him because she is the only person who would do him justice, she said sarcastically that she bet it had something to do with Merchant Ivory, at which point he said no, it had to do with the New Yorker, and left her without saying goodbye; saying he was with Joe Saleh and he told him meeting her was probably an evil omen; wondering what the point of maintaining that connection is; saying he doesn't wish to know her any more, and that she didn't wish them well on the film; saying that, in retrospect, it sounds like he might be making a big deal out of nothing.