Janaki watches him, as he sits before her with head bent, thinking. She murmurs a soft thank you and switches off the Walkman. He looks up as she rewinds the tape and switches on the play button. Ashesh goes into a panic. He doesn’t want to hear his own voice. Let the tape be blank. Let it not have recorded a single word. ‘Well, what can I say? There’s a time in every artist’s life . . .’ His voice? Good heavens! No inflections, no modulations. Dull, boring, flat. Ashesh gets up. ‘That’s enough, don’t you think? It’s all there. Will you have something now? Tea? Coffee?’

‘Love some tea.’

Ashesh is at the cooking counter.

‘Who cooks for you?’

He turns around startled. It’s a simple question. But it tends to have undercurrents when a woman asks it of a single man. Whether his answer is, ‘I do it myself’ or ‘I have it catered’ or ‘I have a cook’, the expression on the woman’s face is almost always: ‘Poor chap. No wife.’ After years of experience, Ashesh answers curtly, ‘Reshma cooks for me.’

‘Oh,’ Janaki says. Ashesh swings around to look at her. She doesn’t look as though she’s thinking ‘Poor dear’. Totally relieved, he asks, ‘What about you?’

‘When I’m at home, I eat with Mrs Khanna. Lunch is in the office cafeteria.’

That’s about it as far as food as a topic of conversation goes.

Janaki takes the first sip of tea and murmurs, ‘Hmmm.’ Ashesh feels as happy as he would be if the appreciative sound was directed at one of his paintings. Janaki lets the liquid touch every part of her tongue before swallowing it.

‘My association with tea is clouded,’ she says, taking a second sip. ‘A grain of sugar more or less, temperature a degree cooler than boiling, and my father would thrash my mother.’

‘He what?’

Janaki observes the disbelief on Ashesh’s face. ‘He would thrash my mother.’

There is complete silence after this, while Ashesh recovers. Janaki waits without saying another word. Tea drunk, she gets up. ‘Our photographer will call you for an appointment.’

‘What?’ Ashesh leaps out of his chair. ‘Don’t be funny.’

‘Funny? We need pictures to go with interviews. He’ll do some of you and some of this painting.’

‘Let him do the painting, but not me. You think I’m going to pose for a picture?’

Janaki looks at him helplessly. The vein near his temple is jumping.

She puts her tote bag down. ‘May I stay for a while?’