Cotton Mary

Ismail Merchant’s remarkable film about cultural identity starring Madhur Jaffrey and Greta Scacchi was released to great acclaim in 2000. Penguin India is proud to publish the superb screenplay of the film, along with a selection of colour stills. The setting is Kerala, the time the 1950s. Lily MacIntosh, wife of BBC correspondent John MacIntosh, gives premature birth to their second child during one of John’s many absences. Lily cannot produce milk, so ‘Cotton Mary,’ one of the Anglo-Indian nurses at the hospital, hints at a solution. She starts taking the baby to her sister Blossom, a wheelchair-bound wet nurse, for feeding. Identifying themselves as British, both sisters yearn for the colonial past and are thrilled to have a white child to look after. Mary enters the MacIntosh household as an ayah and, with Lily depressed and withdrawn, works her way into a position of increasing power. She begins to harbour delusions of replacing Lily as the lady of the house, unaware that her niece Rosie has become John’s lover. Events take a strange turn and soon Mary’s world comes crashing down around her.