Letter from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, to James Ivory, New York, New York, 1974 January 9 : autograph manuscript signed.

Offering a long, forceful pep talk regarding the "Wild Party" project: "Don't for a moment forget that you have a terrible script [written by Walter Marks] there, and that the only salvation for you and Ismail and everyone concerned with that film is to start again-- start with the poem and the Mission Inn-- and get something real and solid and workable down before you begin ..."; reporting that Cary Welch has arrived in India in suit and tie, contrasting wildly with the last time she saw him in beard and "India clothes"; opposing Ivory's assessment of Welch as having "all sorts of talents but no creative drive"; describing her "new friend," World Bank official Wolf Ladejinsky, also a collector of Indian paintings and drawings, who she has arranged for Cary to meet; telling him that "Nora Nicholson-- you remember the old lady living under a tree with 20 dogs-- has been brought to 1-B Flagstaff Rd. suffering from diptheria"; recounting how Nicholson "lives off" her many visitors, "play[ing] off one set of homes and hearts against another"; describing "someone I never knew but had vaguely heard about," a French monk called Swami Ahbishiktananda, who Raimon Panikkar and Father James Stuart had told her about.