all over America. Midway through the tour, Saeed returned to Washington, D.C. from Miami to marry Madhur in a modest civil ceremony. The next day, they travelled to New York City where Madhur got a job as a tour guide to the United Nations, while Saeed did public relations work for the Government of India Tourist Office. Between 1959 and 1963, Madhur and Saeed had three daughters: Meera, Zia and Sakina. In September 1958, Ismail Merchant arrived from Bombay to attend the New York University Stern School of Business. Merchant had heard of Saeed from his theater days in Delhi. He himself wanted to produce plays and make movies. Saeed was then playing the lead at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in an Off-Broadway production of Blood Wedding, a tragedy by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. Merchant approached Saeed with a proposal to put on a Broadway production of The Little Clay Cart, starring the Jaffreys. Saeed took him home for dinner, where he met Madhur, who was heavily pregnant with the Jaffreys' first child. The following year, James Ivory, then an emerging film maker from California, approached Saeed Jaffrey to provide the narration for his short film about Indian miniature painting, The Sword and the Flute (1959). Saeed brought Ivory home for dinner and introduced him to Madhur. When The Sword and the Flute screened in New York City in 1961, the Jaffreys encouraged Merchant to attend the screening, where he met Ivory for the first time. They subsequently met regularly at the Jaffreys' dinners and cemented their relationship into a lifetime partnership, both personal and professional. The Jaffreys planned to go back to India, start a travelling company and tour with it. They would often discuss this idea with James Ivory and started writing a script in his brownstone on East 64th Street. The Jaffreys soon expanded their social circle to include other members of the Indian community in New York City who were involved in the arts. They regularly hosted large dinners cooked by Madhur, who was determined to master everything, including biryani and pulao. In 1962, Madhur and Saeed appeared in Rolf Forsberg's Off-Broadway production of A Tenth of an Inch Makes The Difference. Their performance was described by The New York Times drama critic, Milton Esterow, as "sensitive acting" that made up "the brightest part of the evening". The pay for such roles was generally $10/hour.