The answer was textured paper in place of textured walls. If women were unwilling to work outside tradition, men could be persuaded to do so. They were not bound by tradition because they were not the traditional painters. However, they knew how to do it because they had grown up watching their mothers and wives paint. Even then, men living within the community might be difficult to persuade for fear of censure.

A solution was found in Jivya Soma Mashe, whom circumstances had separated from family and community. He lived away from his pada, scratching drawings into the earth to express his sorrow through his art. He was willing to shift to paper. He had the talent, imagination and skill to add new motifs to the old, deploying them in new ways. Jivya Soma Mashe thus became the first and most famous Warli painter on the urban circuit.

Meanwhile Warli women had continued to paint their auspicious drawings on the walls of their huts.

It is against this background that the picture painted by Haridas’s maid Girji on a wall of his house assumes significance. Girji has been working in the house for several years, but had thus far disregarded all of Haridas’s requests to make a painting on his wall. He has no idea what prompted her to change her mind. But the result is a large painting done in conventional motifs. There is a crescent moon, a dazzling sun, trees and animals. Along with these regular motifs, an intriguing, even disturbing event has been recorded in the bottom right-hand corner of the work. (See picture.) A female figure lies prone on the ground before a line of men. This figure is a ‘bhutali’ or witch, a practitioner of black magic.

When there are sudden, inexplicable deaths in Warli padas, when epidemics strike, or when somebody’s illness refuses to respond to traditional medicine, the pada begins to buzz with the word bhutali. The bhutali is always an inhabitant of the pada and often turns out to be a destitute widow. The village exorcist is called in to discover who she is. He makes a pretence of reading a scatter of rice, but with his ear to the ground, he knows whom the villagers suspect or hold a grudge against. As soon as the exorcist declares her to be the bhutali, the men of the village drag her out of her hut, or wherever she may be cowering in fear, and take turns to beat her with sticks till she . . .

‘Busy writing, hunh?’

Janaki looks up startled and stares open-jawed at the person standing before her.

‘Prakash?’ Her voice sounds like a bleat.

‘May I sit down?’