The nonprofit-documentary life was not, according to Nair, exactly “comfy.” “It was a mountain of rejection,” she says—a constant battle to find money, followed by a constant battle to find an audience. “I was getting killed on both sides.” Every year from 1980 to 1984, Nair spent weeks on a Greyhound bus, taking her work to unions, women’s hostels, and colleges. “I would make, like, three hundred dollars a pop, live in the dorms with the students, or in some assistant professor’s house,” she says. The questions from the audience weren’t particularly encouraging. “It was depressing to be in bloody Minneapolis and have an old lady say, ‘I noticed a tap in your documentary. Do you have running water in India?’ ” Nair says. “You’d think, Fuck, who am I doing this for? I’m not here to educate you about India.” And, as she found out with “India Cabaret,” which was bought by PBS, then rejected by Channel 13, PBS’s New York affiliate, the Indian community could be just as misguided. “ ‘What is this image of India you are presenting? When will you show us doctors and the Porsches I have in my garage?’ ” Nair says, imitating a Bollywood accent. “I said, ‘When a doctor in a Porsche becomes an interesting character, I’ll be there.’ ” Television, she says, “felt like a void. I didn’t know whom I was reaching.” She began to hanker for a wider audience and for more control over the gesture, the light, the story—“to be able to pick out the color of the actor’s underwear.” In other words, instead of waiting for the truth in hit-and-run documentary fashion, Nair wanted to organize it in a fictional way.

In 1985, “India Cabaret” opened the first Indian International Film Festival, in Hyderabad, where, as Nair wrote to Epstein, who had served as the documentary’s cinematographer, it was “a pretty major sensation.” In Nair’s assessment, “People were really responding to the language, how people really talk in Bombay.” Sooni Taraporevala attended the screening on her way to Orissa, where she and Nair had planned to do research for a film about Nair’s childhood. “The audience was totally into it—you know, laughing and clapping,” she says. “It wasn’t just the language, to my mind. It was the sense of something’s being relevant.” Buoyed by the reaction to the film, Taraporevala reminded Nair of a subject they’d discussed before. “Why not develop your earlier idea on the Bombay kids instead?” she asked. Nair’s response, as she wrote in her journals, was “It’s too huge, too ambitious. . . . Sooni retorted in her fearless, nonchalant style: ‘NO GUTS NO GLORY.’ ” Nair and Taraporevala changed their tickets and set off for Bombay.

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The challenge was herculean. Nair had never been on a movie set, never made a feature film, never developed a budget, and had no access to real funding, though, by even a modest estimate, she would need almost a million dollars. “The cost of my film is the cost of a leg of one camel in . . . ‘Ishtar,’ ” Nair told studio executives. Nonetheless, in June of 1987, Nair began the project without the money to finish it. She felt, she says, “like a warrior.” The slogan on the production T-shirts bore witness to her bravado: “NO GUTS NO GLORY—52 LOCATIONS 52 DAYS—WHAT PROBLEM? NO PROBLEM.”

The enterprise brought together the intellectual strands of Nair’s life: theatre, politics, the documentary tradition. Acting workshops were organized for the street children Nair recruited—a hundred and thirty narrowed down to twenty-four, who were then issued official-looking I.D. cards to protect them from being carted off by the police and remanded to the almost Dickensian homes dramatized in the film. In a series of drafts, Nair and Taraporevala developed a plot from the stories of street children they had interviewed. The film, they decided, would follow an abandoned ten-year-old as he made his way through the choked Bombay slums, where he lived rough among beggars and drug addicts, progressing from bumpkin to street-savvy survivor. “Salaam Bombay!” would capture the pathos and bravery amid India’s chaos, the realities of its low life and its low talk.

But the uncertainty of so many factors, according to Epstein, who was the co-producer and production designer, made the situation “hellish.” “It was a David-and-Goliath situation,” he says. “We were up against all the odds—how to get through it, how not to get sick, how to keep everybody together. It was larger than us.” Dinaz Stafford, Nair’s collaborator and trouble-shooter, remembers one moment of despair: “We’d been working on the film. We’d set up the workshop. This huge juggernaut had been moved into action, getting people to work for hardly any money. And Mira and I went up on the top of this building—it was sunset—and she told me she didn’t have the money for the project. It was like, O.K., we may have to close this now.” After a lot of flimflammery and economy with the truth, Nair managed to cajole completion cash out of a French company. At the end of the shoot, she wrote in her journal, “I am so worn out, worn out of feeling, insisting, demanding, hoping, making it happen. A section of my hair has turned almost completely gray, à la Indira.” She was thirty years old. Six months later, on May 19, 1988, only three days after she’d finished cutting the movie, “Salaam Bombay!” made its world première at the closing gala at Cannes. After the screening, a crowd of two thousand stood and applauded for more than fifteen minutes. “Salaam Bombay!” was the first Indian film to win the Caméra d’Or at Cannes; it also earned an Oscar nomination.

Nair’s life changed again on March 29, 1989, when she and Taraporevala were in Nairobi researching “Mississippi Masala,” this time with studio backing. The movie aimed to tell the story of some Indian-Africans, exiled from Uganda by Idi Amin, making a new life in the United States. It was Nair and Taraporevala’s first visit to Africa. For her research, Nair had read Mahmood Mamdani’s book “From Citizen to Refugee,” which dealt with the Ugandan expatriation, and she had arranged to interview him in Kampala, where he lived. But Mamdani turned up early, in Nairobi, and called from the lobby of Nair’s hotel to ask if she was free. “We thought he would be a fudsy-dudsy professor,” Nair says. She told Taraporevala, “He’s some sort of a lefty. Let’s just hide the materialism.” They were shoving the bags and sarongs they’d purchased earlier that day under their beds when the bell rang. Nair opened the door to Mamdani, a handsome Ugandan-Asian in his early forties, with playful eyes and a gentle authority. He looked over Nair’s shoulder. “I’m looking for Mira Nair,” he said. “I’d expected a middle-aged, sort of sagelike person,” Mamdani explains. “I had no idea who Mira was. I lived in a city that didn’t have a functioning movie theatre.”

They met up again a few days later in Kampala. In that ghostly setting—the war had just ended, and the city was devastated—their relationship began. The trajectories of their lives had an eerie similarity: both came from small towns and now moved in multiple worlds; both had won scholarships to Harvard; and both blended the personal and the political in their work. By the time Nair left, she had become, she says, “humbled by love.” In typically headstrong fashion, she returned to New York and, as she put it, “willed myself” out of a marriage that, on the surface, “had nothing wrong with it.” “I thought, I can’t control it. I can’t stop,” Nair says. “Mitch said I took a piece of his heart. It was true. And it was terrible. I turned my back on the home we had made. I felt like a foreigner again, totally outside.” Epstein stayed on as the co-producer and production designer of “Mississippi Masala,” but, he says, “the way we worked together had little of the grace and the quality of communication we had achieved over the years.” Nair soon moved to Kampala’s Makerere University, where Mamdani was teaching political science, and where, in campus housing, they had running water for only an hour a day. “I went from Jacuzzi to jerrican,” Nair says. “Love is like that.”