Bridge over troubled waters

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How should I start writing?" 17-year old Devyani Saltzman asked Philip Gourevitch many years ago. "With a pen," replied the New Yorker correspondent and author. "That answer took away all the exclusivity I associated with the profession," Saltzman laughs during our chat "" it was too informal to be called an interview ""at the Penguin India office.

"I had such high regard for his work and what he said made writing seem much more accessible. It made me less self-conscious about doing it."

The effect is evident in Saltzman's own first book. Shooting Water tells the story of the tortuous, controversy-laden filming of her mother Deepa Mehta's Water, about the lives of widows in 1930s Benaras.

In late 1999, Saltzman travelled from Canada to India to serve as an assistant cameraperson on the film. But Water had to be scrapped as a result of agitation from the Hindu right-wing; it was subsequently revived in 2003 with a different cast, and the film premiered inToronto last year.

But the book is more than a behind-the-scenes account of the moviemaking process. It's equally about how working on the film became therapeutic at a personal level "" how it helped Saltzman and her mother mend the cracks in a relationship that had been faltering since her parents separated years earlier.

In a hotel room during the original filming in 2000, Saltzman picked up the phone to hear a volley of abuses followed by a death threat directed at her mother. "From that moment," she says, "I was completely involved with her struggle to get this film made. It brought us closer to each other."

The mingling of the personal and the political makes Shooting Water very unlike the usual memoir. "I didn't want it to be a clinical and detached account of the filming, but I didn't want to write an Oprah-esque melodrama either," says Saltzman. "I like looking at social and political issues in a personal way."

One of the things she liked about Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families was how it took a horrific real-life tragedy "" the 1994 genocide in Rwanda "" and gave it a personal perspective.

Between the age of 11 and 19, Saltzman spent hardly any time in India, and Shooting Water does betray a certain political naivete in places, but it's evident that she is keen to learn about the country.

In the second half of our conversation, she asks more questions than I do: how Arundhati Roy is perceived ("I have mixed feelings about the way she shouts her opinions out at people, but I'm also glad someone is speaking out"); the publishing machinery in India; the way Indian writers tend to be perceived.

We talk about the farcical nature of the protests that shelved the film in 2000: the case of the putative suicide, for instance, who took off his watch and handed it to a friend for safekeeping before jumping into the river; and the political mileage (predictably, he's a local MLA now).

"The first thing that occurred to me was, what a waste of energy this is. I don't want to sound like the preachy NRI going on about what's wrong with India," she says, mindful of stereotypes, "All countries have similar or worse problems of their own. But it's such a pity "" on the one hand there's this dynamic, burgeoning democracy, and on the other hand there are people who are so regressive."

A recurring theme in Mehta's script for Water is the way ancient texts are used to suppress people, especially women, even today: the following of customs and traditions for no better reason than that "they have always been there".

"Of course there are plenty of good traditions that must be cherished and preserved," Saltzman is quick to add, "but when a seven-year-old girl is condemned to social ostracism because of the death of a "husband" she hasn't meet "" well, that's self-evidently wrong."

With the confidence obtained from finishing her first book, Saltzman wants to be a full-time writer; she's working on a novel about young women peacekeepers in conflict zones.

Meanwhile, she'll continue with freelance writing, including for Indian publications. And though Canada continues to be her base, she thinks of herself as what Pico Iyer memorably called the Global Soul, "whose sense of home, if it exists at all, lies in the ties and talismans he carries around with him".

"Geographical boundaries," she says, "are becoming less relevant all the time. Home is where the heart is!"