After Wuthering Heights, The Age Of Innocence, King Lear and Persuasion, guest columnist Sal's fantasy casting for notable works of literature, concludes this week with Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth getting the Bollywood touch.

Sal thus far has had an interesting take on the books that would shine on celluloild, but we'd love to hear any ideas that you may have that you'd like to share with us! 

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This week's fantasy casting is for:

Book: Unaccustomed Earth (Hema and Kaushik) by Jhumpa Lahiri

Plot: Two Indian-American teenagers are briefly acquainted when their parents share a house together. They go on to live separate lives, experience loss and sorrow, meet years later, and have a brief, intense love affair.

What it’d look like: This one would need some fleshing out to make a full-length Bollywood movie, since it is a set of three short stories, the first two of which focus on the titular pair as teens, but I could see it making a beautifully elegiac romance. The trickiest bit would be figuring out why the film would need to be in Hindi, I think, since the protagonists primarily speak English and Bengali, but perhaps it could be a Finding Fanny-style bilingual. The natural choice for this sort of story would be Imtiaz Ali, but he tends to sell his women short and over-valorize his men. I’d have Vikramaditya Motwane, who has such a delicate way with heartbreak and melancholia, direct. Alternately, this would be a fine project for Mira Nair, who made the stellar adaptation of Lahiri’s The Namesake.

Cast: Neither character reads as talky or gregarious, and both have a quality of quietude to them. Priyanka Chopra (who has the crossover appeal to boot!) and Ranbir Kapoor, were he willing and able to do the accent work, would be my picks. I’d also take Kalki Koechlin opposite Suraj Sharma. Sushmita Sen would appear in a cameo as the impossibly charismatic mother who dies young and leaves her son bereft.

What are books you’d like to see Bollywood adaptations of?

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