by Subhash K Jha

Shabana has done it again. She has completed another international assignment.

Says the formidable actress, "Bangla Town Banquet is written by Tanika Gupta who wrote the play Waiting Room which I performed at the National Theatre in London and directed by a r-e-a-l-l-y bright and talented woman Hettie Macdonald. I'm the film's protagonist.

I play a Bangladeshi woman Sufiya living in East London who has two sons. Priya Kalidas of Bombay Dreams plays my daughter. I play a strange kind of woman with a fetish for growing kaddoo in my small balcony. My character talks to and screams at her plants.

Very quirky kind of character. Then her husband brings home a second wife, a woman who's younger than their daughter. The daughter is hopping mad. But Sufiya us calm. On a day- trip with two friends she discovers the courage to walk out of the bad marriage."

You tell her it sounds like all those deserted-wife neo-classics like Arth and Yeh Kaisa Insaaf she did in Bollywood 25 years ago.

"Not at all! It's not so much a film on marital issues as a buddy film about female bonding. What's lovely is that my character interacts with a ghost who comes and moves my character's soul in unexpected ways."

She stops and sighs, "I'm very happy with this film."