Bridges of Madison County; by Robert James Waller.

According to an inside tip, by a colleague from India, a friend of his and of the creator of the film that was subsequently written up as the book were in midwest at university together when the two went and saw Parama, a bilingual film by Aparna Sen, at a time when Parama was a new film and a sensational one. The two were impressed, and the one perhaps new to Indian films subsequently went on to make Bridges of Madison County. No credit is or ever was given to the source of the inspiration, as far as we know.

The points copied from Parama in this work are clear to anyone familiar with both, but this one goes far more into sex, and thereby misses out on the rich texture of the other that was partly contextual and partly in the artists that created it. Also, since the story was taken to the other side of the world in more than one way, it had to be changed enough to make sense and romance from another perspective, since it was being planted in another culture, where an extra marital affair might not be such a thrill or a sin in social terms of today either.

And while the original was about an identity that was lost in the everyday life of the woman and she found it - accidentally as it were - when someone out of her circle loved her for herself, that again was not going to be a new thing either, since that has pretty much been a theme of women's movement since the sixties in west. So it was then pared down to an intense love story that began with sex and very soon changed, into a love that remained faithful but unrequited, with the two neither meeting nor every forgetting one another.

The self discovery of the woman and the guilt imposed by society were both thrown out, reducing the complexity and making it less her story and more of the tryst that became a romance. In the original the man is a catalyst, this copy made him a partner and a lover till his death.

Some features were retained - the photographer who travels around the world who meets a seemingly ordinary housewife and falls in love with her, the talk of traveling around the world, the dreaming, and so on, with her rediscovering beauty and romance that she did not have in her own life much.

A haunting love story, worth reading, almost of another era if you don't know where it came from - and it is, of another ethos.