"It's certainly a strange combination," says Terrance Grace, writer, producer and director of the Naseeruddin Shah starrer Mr Ahmed, which won prizes at the San Francisco and Atlanta film festivals and which carries the stamp of Emmy award-winning director of photography, Nick Hutak. In India, Mr Ahmed has only been screened once—at the International Film Festival in Bombay in early 1995.
"I became involved in a fluffy cultural documentary on south India as a writer, that was my introduction to India," says Grace. The TV documentary, for the Discovery travel channel, did not even require him to travel to India. But Grace, who has a Silver Star from the Sacramento Film Festival under his belt, found himself interacting with several Indians along the way. An idea grew, as did fascination. And involvement: he met and fell in love with an Indian beauty—and brain—from Uttar Pradesh, Zeyba Rahman. The magic grew into marriage and beyond; Grace found himself writing the first sketches of a feature film he always wanted to make. And when he met Shah, Zeyba's cousin, he'd found his protagonist, Mr Ahmed.
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Shah acted in the film for "less than nothing". Grace marvelled at the Bombay-based actor's unpretentiousness. Nobody on the all-American crew knew his star stature, neither did he flaunt it. Now both Shah and actress-wife Ratna Pathak-Shah are to star in Grace's forthcoming film, Suddenly... Quietly, India, which will commence shooting later in 1996, entirely on location in India.
Shah will play Nafis, a brooding, silent man, determined to get to the bottom of all the mysteries shrouding Roland Whitby, an Anglo-Indian who returns to India during the Emergency after a gap of 30 years. Nafis is a manic collector of the past—news-clippings, photos, films, mostly of the Independence era. A 1947 riot is of particular obsessive interest to him—in the form of a blurred film clip in which can be seen his wife Ria (Pathak-Shah) as a terrified girl.
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There is an "ageing dinosaur" from the early days of Bollywood, there are hat-and-coat-tailed Brits, there is lost love, cross-cultural romance and a lingering longing for the days gone by. And above all—as with Mr Ahmed, and indeed a lot of Grace'searlier works—there are ghosts. Grace plays with spectres as with plasticine—not because of any Indian-influenced sense of karmic continuity, but goaded by the magic of the medium to blend the past, present and future. Consequently, the dead flit in and out of life with nonchalance and non-ghoulishness. In Mr Ahmed, Pathak-Shah, as Naseer's deceased mother, sultrily roams kitsch-tinged Pennsylvanian forests in fall, just to ensure her adult son, an immigrant in the US, is doing well. And as Ria in Suddenly..., she has many encounters with her dead mother in her house.
Unlike Mr Ahmed (52 minutes), Suddenly... will be on an "epic scale" and big names are involved. The first is a "natural jump-off point", but the second isn't a sequel. "It deals with powerful issues a whole generation went through—a passage from old colonial India into modernity," says Grace.
How does an American develop such insight? Rahman, who co-produces his films, helps tremendously. "I find it fascinating that India is multi-cultural. American don't see that. For them in general, India could be Mars. No one knows about it, no one goes there."
After a relentless barrage of blue-eyed princesses coated in Egyptian Earth Powder and speaking in funny accents, this man—from a country of equal cross-cultural paradoxes—may well bring a whiff of fresh air into the world of films revolving around India.
