ANISH This is how I found out. My father never told me.

MRS SWAN And this painting?

ANISH Yes. Underneath everything was this painting. A portrait of a woman, nude, but in a composition in the old Rajasthani style. Even more amazing, a European woman. I couldn’t imagine who she was or what it meant. I kept it, of course, all these years. Then, a week ago, in the shop window … It was like seeing a ghost. Not her ghost; his. It was my father’s hand, his work, I had grown up watching him work. I had seen a hundred original Nirad Dases, and here was his work, not once but repeated twenty times over, a special display. The Collected Letters of Flora Crewe, and I saw that it was the same woman.

MRS SWAN Yes. Oh yes, it’s Flora. It’s as particular as an English miniature. A watercolour, isn’t it?

ANISH Watercolour and gouache.

MRS SWAN He hasn’t made her Indian.

ANISH Well, she was not Indian.

MRS SWAN Yes, I know, I’m not gaga, I’m only old. I mean he hasn’t painted her flat. Everything else looks Indian, like enamel … the moon and stars done with a pastry cutter. The birds singing in the border … and the tree in bloom, so bright. Is it day or night? And everything on different scales. You can’t tell if the painter is in the house or outside looking in.

ANISH She is in a house within a house. The Mughals brought miniature painting from Persia, but Muslim and Hindu art are different. The Muslim artists were realists. But to us Hindus, everything is to be interpreted in the language of symbols.

MRS SWAN And a book on the pillow, that’s Flora.

ANISH Yes. That is her. Also the flowering vine … look where it sheds its leaves and petals, they are falling to the ground. I think my father knew your sister was dying.

MRS SWAN Oh …

ANISH She is not posing, you see, but resting.

MRS SWAN Resting?

ANISH This was painted with love. The vine embraces the dark trunk of the tree.

MRS SWAN Now really, Mr Das, sometimes a vine is only a vine. Whether she posed for him or whether it’s a work of the imagination …

ANISH Oh, but the symbolism—

MRS SWAN Codswallop! Your ‘house within a house’, as anyone can see, is a mosquito net. And the book is Emily Eden, it was in her suitcase. Green with a brown spine. You should read the footnotes!

Mrs Swan and Anish leave as Pike enters.

PIKE The book was Up the Country (1866). Miss Eden was accompanying her brother, the Governor-General Lord Auckland, on an official progress up country. The tour, supported by a caravan of ten thousand people, including Auckland’s French chef, lasted thirty months, and Emily wrote hundreds of letters home, happily unaware that the expedition was to set the stage for the greatest military disaster ever to befall the British under arms, the destruction of the army in Afghanistan.