WEST COMES EAST

May 6,after a moderate success in the UK,where it garnered over 300 million pounds in seven weeks since its release. “Immediately after East is East,people were clamouring for me to come up with a sequel,but I did not want to jump into it,” says the 50-year old British writer of Pakistani origin,speaking from his luxurious hilltop bungalow in Andalusia,Spain.

If his semi-autobiographical narrative,East is East,was seen through the eyes of Sajid Khan,the youngest child of immigrant parents in Britain,in West is West he takes the viewer from the cushy environs of Salford to his ancestral home in rural Pakistan. While the former was about the marriage of two brothers,the latter focuses on Sajid Khan as a troublesome teenager,sent by his father to Pakistan to understand his cultural identity. “Pakistan was a rude culture shock for me. At that time I was a 13-year-old pain-in-the-neck teenager,who was sent from Salford of 1974 to the middle of nowhere,surrounded by farms,water buffaloes and a typical village in the subcontinent,” recalls Khan-Din,who began writing the script in 2007,once he moved to Spain with his wife.

Though the script for East is East was adapted from a play he had written in 1982,the sequel is loosely based on a draft of a screenplay,written years ago,about his life in Pakistan as a 13-year-old. Also semi-autobiographical in nature,Khan-Din fictionalises the plot by sending his British mother to Pakistan to interact with his father’s first wife. “I thought it would be fascinating to imagine what my mother would have felt about my father’s first wife and how would she have interacted with her,” explains Khan-Din,who shot the film in the outskirts of Chandigarh. While actor Vijay Raaz has been introduced in the sequel,the principle characters remain the same,including Om Puri,Aqib Khan,Jimmi Mistry and Ila Arun.

In 2007,Khan-Din’s play titled Rafta Rafta opened at the National

Theatre,Britain,to a rapturous welcome. The production,which was a comical adaptation of Bill Naughton’s play All in Good Time,revolved around newly weds within the Indian community in Britain,who find it hard to consummate their marriage. The cinematic version of that play opens in the UK theatres this year.

Currently,the writer is busy scripting a musical for the British National Theatre. Titled Bunty Burman Presents,this is set in a poverty-stricken film studio in the 1950s,in Mumbai. A sequel to West is West is not ruled out either. “I am thinking of one more film,just to round of the story of Sajid. It will be set in the ’80s in the UK,” says Khan-Din.