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Interview with Mira Nair It is 9 a.m. on a sleepy morning in Lahore, Pakistan, and Mira Nair is sipping apple juice on an airplane bound for Karachi, where she is to present a film and take questions from a mammoth audience. Just last night, she was laughing and dancing to live music at a New Year’s Eve party. And here she is five hours later, waiting for the plane to take off. Is she tired? Nervous? “Oh no,” she says, chuckling, “I can handle it.” Yesterday, at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Lahore, Nair presented a short film about a Muslim family living in New York City to thunderous applause. The hall was packed – more than a thousand people had shown up – and Nair walked up to the podium calm as a sage. “Thank you,” she said, drawing her palms together in the namaste greeting gesture, “I feel like I’ve come home.” Pakistan is not, strictly speaking, her home. Nair was born in 1958 across the border in Bhubaneshwar, India. She grew up reading Victorian classics (one of which, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, she was later to direct) on a bucolic hill station, where she was drawn to acting and theatre. She won a scholarship to Harvard and was among the first undergraduates to enroll in the Visual and Environmental Studies program. “You know,” she says, massaging her chin, “I remember getting on the Greyhound and taking my work to conferences and lectures in New York. I was uninvited, and I didn’t have a penny in my pocket. But I absolutely had to do it.” Nair’s thesis – a 20-minute, black and white documentary – was shot in the neighborhood surrounding the Jamia Mosque in New Delhi. It shows a young Nair walking around the marketplace with her camera while barbers and fruit vendors stare at her. Sometimes the camera can’t get enough of an image – an old tree, a woman in a burqa, rows of praying men – and at other times it is impatient to move on. Much of the time the camera wobbles. One comes away with a swirl of sounds and images, sensing somehow that film can only suggest a story, never tell it in its entirety. This, I later discover, is the result of Nair’s training at Harvard: she was taught by the pioneers of cinema verite. In 1988 Nair went to Bombay. There she lived for months among impoverished street children and shot her first feature film on a tiny budget. The film, titled Salaam Bombay!, was Nair’s homage to the greatest port city of India, which was crammed with pimps and prostitutes and served as a sizzling platter for what she calls “the circus of life”. Salaam Bombay! was an instant hit. It won the Camera D’Or at Cannes and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. Nair had made it. But instead of using her newfound credibility to plunge into alien waters, Nair stuck to the themes she had touched upon in Salaam Bombay!: love, family and community. In 1993 she made a film called Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial love affair between a Hindu Indian girl (Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man (Denzel Washington) in the lazy, humid setting of the American south. The idea for the film came from Nair’s post-college days in New York, when she worked as a waitress at an Indian restaurant. “There was such a racial hierarchy,” she says. “Black men cleaned the kitchen, brown women served the food, and white couples sat at the tables and ate their meals.” Similarly, when Nair made a film about Cuban immigrants called The Perez Family, she was speaking from experience. “The Cubans,” she says, “are so like the Indians. They have similarly large families, the same sense of festivity, and the same love for food!”
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