on the set of Maniben.com with Smriti

Shibani, offered to take Gail Nyoka of Toronto and me around Mumbai. After we checked out the aptly named FabIndia and Ghandi's cooperative, Khadi, with its beautiful hand woven silks and cottons and wonderfully smelling skin products-all for the benefit of the villagers who make the products- we drove very far north (in the 1600's Mumbai was a string of islands that have since been consolidated with land fills and bridges) where all the Bollywood and TV studios are. Shibani's daughter, Smriti Irani, is one of Indian TV's top stars, though we didn't learn this until after we had visited her on the set. They were shooting her current serial, Maniben.com, when we arrived- a family comedy about a village woman who comes to the city but tries to keep her traditional ways. The show was adapted from a play that Smriti starred in. Before this, Smriti was a hit in her previous serial that was especially popular in Afghanistan, so popular in fact that one night while an Afghan family was glued to the set, they were robbed and the thieves wrote in big letters on the walls around the house, THANK YOU, SMRITI!" When Smriti is done shooting she heads to the theater where's she's appearing in a new play that she has also produced.