Abhishek and Aishwarya in Umrao Jaan. (Right): Jaya on the Sunglass sets. Pix: Aranya Sen

Calcutta, Nov. 6: Gushing about the on-screen pairing but brushing off the off-screen one, Jaya Bachchan swung from mother candid to mother cagey three days after the release of Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai’s Umrao Jaan.

“I have seen Umrao Jaan... What I loved about the film is that Abhishek and Aishwarya looked very nice together… And I loved that,” declared Jaya, in between playing mother to Konkona Sen Sharma on the sets of Rituparno Ghosh’s Sunglass on Monday afternoon. “I can’t say how good or bad a film it is. It’s very difficult for me to be objective. I liked the film and I liked Abhishek’s performance. He was very comfortable in the role and he gave a look to the film…”

And his lady love? “Aishwarya, I thought, was quite good,” said the Bachchan bahu.

Then, when the obvious question was popped — so, is Abhishek going to marry Aishwarya — Jaya snapped: “That’s not a nice question to ask.” Period.

The “not a nice question” is, of course, being asked in hushed tones everywhere in the film fraternity. The biggest buzz in Bollywood grew louder when at the stroke of midnight on November 1, the Bachchans co-hosted a birthday bash for Aishwarya in Mumbai.

Three days later, the Ash-Abhishek-J.P. Dutta film hit the theatres — the first in a long line of Sanjay Gadhvi’s Dhoom II, Mani Ratnam’s Guru and Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar 2, where the two share screen space.

Monday took Jaya to St James Church and a house in south Calcutta, where some mother-daughter scenes were canned for the film that Ritparno and she had first discussed 10 years ago.