Balwant Gargi’s daughter waiting to turn novel into film

Sarika Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 3

Jannat Gargi was 14 when she first read “The Naked Triangle”, her famous father’s controversial autobiographical novel. It took her some years to come to terms with it and realise it was Balwant Gargi’s explanation to his children.

Spectrum:  My uncle Balwant

On the playwright’s birth centenary on December 4, Jannat, a film producer in the US, says he wanted her to make a film on it. Gargi passed away 13 years ago. “The Naked Triangle”, the book, is still talked about. The dream is waiting to be realised. Born in Bathinda, the eminent Punjabi playwright and theatre director is still remembered for the pen sketches of Punjabi writers. 

Jannat is the younger of Gargi’s two kids with his American wife Jeanne. She recalls how her father had an incredible passion for people, for language, the craft of storytelling and a deep passion for life. “He was curious and inquisitive in ways that he found beauty where most people wouldn’t recognise it,” she says.

“He dedicated ‘The Naked Triangle’ to Manu, my brother, and me. I first read the novel when I was 14 years old and found it quite upsetting as you can imagine. It wasn’t until years later that I realised in a sense that this was his explanation to his children. During my long stay with my father when I was in college, we talked about the book and the idea of adapting it for a feature film,” recalls Jannat, whose parents split when she was four.

“I don’t have many early childhood memories of my father. It wasn’t until I was 19 and returned to India for a four-month stay during college that I really came to know him.” Over the course of her adult life, Jannat saw her father only seven times, but remembers him as being “incredibly charming and charismatic and his home always buzzing with friends and visitors from all over the globe”.

She says each visit was concentrated and intense, sharing hours of deep conversation and becoming immersed in his world. “It was as if we were making up for all the lost years.” In fact, she credits him for fuelling her interest in arts. 

Jannat is a producer of Emmy and Oscar-nominated documentary films. During her stay, they discussed Gargi’s “The Naked Triangle”, wherein he lays bare the truths of his life unabashedly — his affair, his infidelity and his work, of course. It is among the only two books by her father that she has read.

They also worked on a story outline together and Jannat later drafted a script. “In his will, he left me all the rights to ‘The Naked Triangle’, in particular the rights for adaptation. It was something he really hoped I would be able to realise. Maybe someday I will.”