Letter from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, to James Ivory, New York, New York, 1971 January 7 : autograph manuscript signed.

Noting that she recently went -- "protesting loudly"-- to see "Hello, Dolly" with Ava and Poji, and to her surprise, "enjoyed it very much"; describing what she liked about it, singling out Barbra Streisand ("she reminded me of Madhur sometimes") for praise, and marvelling at the bad reviews and lack of box office it apparently received; observing "how broken-hearted [director] Gene Kelly must have been"; explaining, "it made me think all over again of our fate and how unfair, yes unfair, unfair, the world has been to you. To you and Ismail both, and most of all to you"noting that lately she doesn't want to think about the past or the future, "but want to concentrate only on getting from hour to hour and from day to day"; musing on the "dark times" they have all been through, and the way his and Merchant's reactions to it have differed-- "You say you feel battered, and why shouldn't you, you have been battered, but I know you haven't been shaken or harmed. Ismail is a different story"; reflecting on how the past couple of years has affected Ivory and Merchant's relationship, and "how painful it was to see this happening, through Guru, and reaching a low point during 'Bombay T' which made that film, for me at any rate, a misery all the way through"; insisting she doesn't blame Merchant for this, and comparing him to a person who catches an illness: "there is some point of weakness in that person which the disease seeks out and fastens itself there and then spreads outwards"; asserting that Merchant "thinks of success as the cure" but maintaining that he is mistaken and in fact doesn't actually want the "all the outward trappings of success" that he thinks he wants, that "his true contentment would be, as would yours, in simply making one film after the other [...] and then you wouldn't care whether one was a success or a failure, you'd just bury yourselves in the next one and so on and so on, living quite rough and putting everything you have into it and being happy"; believing that this would be the case if they could work steadily, "[i]nstead of between each film having to stare into the abyss"; repeating her conviction the Merchant "doesn't really want the things he says he wants" and insisting that, given the choice of "producing one of those billion-dollar big star extravaganzas and making with you a small-budget Merchant-Ivory film with all the attendant Merchant-Ivory risks," he would choose the latter; updating him on the status of the novel "with which I've been struggling now for 5 months" and comparing her mindset to Ivory's in the middle of a shoot; concluding, "Hideous tales of snow and ice and dreadful frosts in Europe and America. Turn up your central heating even if your furniture cracks."