Cast from the same dye

If you look only at her eyes -- huge, quiet and filled with sadness -- you could be forgiven for thinking that you are watching Smita Patil ...

If you look only at her eyes — huge, quiet and filled with sadness — you could be forgiven for thinking that you are watching Smita Patil in Bhumika or Charkha or even Arth. And the similarity does not end there. Though Manya Jethmalani keeps the conversation flowing, words choke in her throat when talk veers to her sister, Smita. "We were more than just sisters, we were confidantes," she says, simply. And the space that Smita occupied in Manya’s life still remains an empty gap.

Even though there are only memories left, her thoughts and feelings about Smita are so rich, that from death they have given birth to something new. And Manya’s work with the Smita Patil Foundation is doing just that — nurturing good cinema while keeping alive the memories of her sister. At the recently held Mumbai Academy of Moving Images (MAMI) film festival, one of her pet projects — India as Location and Link…View from Abroad — came under the limelight. Four films by Indian directors living abroad were screened and Manya is still excited by the response.

"I have been very ill these past few months, so the other concepts I was working on were put on hold. But I never give up my concepts because I know they are very good," she says. Manya started working with the foundation after she got back to India from New York, five years ago. She had gone to study fashion there when she was 22, and after marriage, her husband’s work kept her in the US. But once the knots of her marriage with Janak Jethmalani started to unravel, Manya came back to India. Except for an occasional glimmer of pain that flashes in her eyes, there are no traces of her rocky past.

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Thirty-eight now, she is going through a divorce with the resilience of a much-younger person. "Right now, I feel as if I am standing at a point where life is just beginning. And I know that the internal struggle will be less from now. Maybe I am just a late bloomer," she laughs.

But on a more serious note, she says that she hasn’t yet found her mission inlife. "I haven’t achieved in the worldly sense as I did not follow one profession. I have done what I wanted to do spontaneously and I enjoyed it," she says. And this off-the-cuff itinerary has included weekend cooking, back stage work for fashion shows and charity among other things. "Though I love working for the foundation, it is not something I want to do full time. And right now my priority is getting my health back," she says.

What is also on top of her list is her 10-year-old son Kail. When he is not `checking his stocks’ on his laptop, he is busy ribbing his mother. More like friends than mother and son, Manya says it is something she has worked hard to achieve. "It took a lot of effort to establish this bond specially when we had just separated. Kail was seven and I made sure that the relationship between his father and me remained amicable because of Kail."

She is not ignoring what is the best for her either, even though she has just been through a rough patch. Checking out various alternative healing techniques to get back her health, she has also let go of her past to regain her peace of mind. "Once when I had gone to Bali, we were sitting in this casual restaurant there run by a man who had been all over the world. He was a big man on that island. It was then that I suddenly realised all of us think we are kings and queens of little kingdoms of our own making. But what this tiny space, that each of us take, matter outside? You shouldn’t give too much importance to yourself. Life is too short for that," she says.Once again, her attitude and life are being shaped by her sister’s death.