Across the room from them, another drama was unfolding. A young man in jeans and shirt was not prepared to give up on the thin woman beside him. Waving away a fly that kept settling on her face, he was pleading with her, explaining to her, trying to coax her into agreement. He pinched his throat several times pledging never again to do the thing that had driven them apart. His face was ready to crumple in tears. Hers, turned away from him, was like stone. He touched her hesitantly with the tip of a finger to get her attention. But her skin too was stone. What was his crime that had made her so unforgiving? This was three years ago, but she has still not forgotten the young man’s pain-filled face. She sees it before her now, as Rafi’s song ends.

‘Have you been crying?’ Feroze asks with instant concern when she steps into his house.

‘Tears of joy.’ She laughs. ‘Because your painting’s done and I’m the first to see it.’

‘It is, it is, at last.’ He sighs happily. ‘You should also sign the work. I saw the entire painting in your voice, Anima, and your voice was in my ears as I painted.’

Anima stands before the painting, awed by its size and its detail. It is a narrative painting that tells the story of the Kurukshetra war. It begins in the top left-hand corner, takes serpentine curves diagonally across the triptych and ends in the bottom right-hand corner. At the top, Krishna is Arjun’s charioteer. In the middle he reveals the universe to Arjun. At the bottom he stands helpless against the events that have been foretold, divested of weapons and all that has made him Krishna. The rest of the canvas is trees and flowering shrubs, wild and domesticated animals, hills and rivers with dead bodies strewn all around. Done in vivid colours and minute detail, the work, at first glance, seems to exude optimism. But then you notice the corpses. Krishna, a vivid blue at the top, is pale white at the bottom. There is not a stitch of clothing on his divine–human body. He is neither man nor woman. His body is on its way to attaining formlessness. The painting is entitled Annihilation.

Krishna is both the doer and the done to in this ultimate massacre. It is known that he will kill and be killed. There’s no question then of his crying out for succour at the last moment, as Jesus Christ did on the cross. He can only wait for what is to be. An archer will come to the jungle and unwittingly shoot an arrow into his heel. He will thank the archer for releasing him from life and merge with the elements. God kills man, man kills God, man kills man and brings the world to a temporary end.