So the two men decided to meet in front of the office itself in Chowringhee, at a quarter past ten on Saturday, before the seven-storeyed building. An old, moustached watchman who had nothing much to occupy him hovered in the background while Pramathesh waited for Ranjit to arrive. When he did, Pramathesh instructed his driver to remain parked where he was. From there, they went in Ranjit’s white Ambassador, the driver in front wordless, down a main artery, which was fairly deserted on a Saturday, towards one of the by-lanes in an area quite far from both New Alipore and the company guest house; Pramathesh, in fact, didn’t know what it was called. Here, they came to a ground-floor flat in an old two-storeyed house in a narrow lane facing, and flanked by, other houses not unlike itself. They were not sure if they should just walk in, but when they did, finding the door open, they saw no one inside; only the ceiling fan hung immobile above them. The painter, emerging into the living room a few minutes later to discover them, didn’t seem to mind their intrusion. He was wearing a dhoti and a shabby jacket himself, and looked abstracted; he glanced at the two men in their pressed shirtsleeves, trousers, and sandals, and appeared to make a shrewd appraisal of why they were here and who they might be. “Was it you who just came up in the car?” he asked, to which Pramathesh said, a little hesitantly, “Yes.” He finally sold Pramathesh two of his paintings very matter-of-factly, bringing them from a room inside, one showing a pale, white forest, in which the trees were crested with white blossoms, with probably a peasant woman walking in it, and the other of a group of figures, possibly pilgrims, walking dimly past a mountainside. One might have missed their appeal; indeed, Pramathesh had to summon up something forgotten inside him, something from his early youth, in order to respond to them. It was not a faculty he had to use often, or of late; and he wasn’t altogether sure of his judgement. At any rate, without quite knowing why, he bought the two paintings for one hundred and fifty rupees each.