Oscar-winning screenwriter James Ivory will adapt Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Delhi-set story "The Judge's Will" with Alexander Payne directing. The film is based on a New Yorker article Jhabvala, a friend and collaborator of Ivory, wrote, reported Deadline. Jhabvala shared a long association with Merchant Ivory Productions which yielded her two Academy Awards for her work on the films A Room with a View and Howards End. She died at the 85 in 2013.

The article, which was the last from Jhabvala, detailed the final moments in the chess game relationship between an ailing Delhi judge and his Bombay wife. Each had separate lives even though they lived under the same roof and, as he nears death, the judge wants to be sure that his even younger, barely educated mistress is cared for and not cast out. "It's a universal enough premise, the business of a wealthy man having a mistress and wanting to take care of her after he dies," Ivory said.