There's bliss and bliss. Hard of hearing, Kamala Attya next door listens to old songs at full volume on her radio and breaks into audible ripples of bliss. But her ripples are confined to things within four walls—she has made a perfect batch of puran polis; somebody in the family has been promoted. Jijabhau's spiritual bliss breaks walls and soars upwards to touch the sky. Music has that power. It creates its own space with the throw of voice, intensity of emotion, density of meaning, the primeval power of note and beat. The painter is trammelled. His space is given. All his acrobatics must happen within it. He must use sleight of hand to convert a two-dimensional surface into an illusionary three. Or protest against the compulsion of pretence and exaggerate the two-dimensionality of the surface. This surface has only two dimensions. I accept this limitation. The limitation challenges my imagination. To face the challenge is to retain the purity of painting.

Twenty years ago Ashesh had followed in the footsteps of his gurus and created abstract works that emphasized the flatness of the picture space. Ai used to call his paintings a mess. Then he became interested in depth, in the play of light and shade. He spent years with space, light, shapes and colours. He let himself go with colour. His palette turned vivid. Then Nasreen left the country and he abandoned colour. He turned to drawing with pencil, charcoal, crayon, ink. That was also when the human form entered his work. By the time he reached out for colour again, the human condition had captured his imagination completely. The pictures that followed were not vibrant with colour. The men and women in them, their environments, their living spaces, the objects surrounding them, were translated into shades of grey and brown. Yet he sought to emphasize their separateness from ‘real’ life, painting frames within the picture frames to underline the ‘pictureness’ of his pictures. It was a deliberate act, unlike last night's when he had allowed an accident to enter his art through the bars of his windows.

Ashesh turns to the canvas and starts. He has never used such an uncompromising black before. Suddenly his palms are cold and there's sweat on his forehead. He ignores these signs of panic and forces himself into a still, quiet concentration. He listens for the faint whisper that had stirred in his mind last night, narrowing his eyes to concentrate on the space within the two black diagonals. What image, what idea had that space prompted? It wasn’t a human form. It was something else. He gets up and moves towards the canvas. The doorbell rings. His movement is broken. His shoulders droop. He is empty.