She had sketched his outline already, faintly tracing the lines of his face onto the canvas: the stern clench of his jaw, the heavy eyebrows and the straight nose. But the eyes and the lips, she was having trouble with those. They were capricious conspirators, the features working in tandem, sometimes serious, sometimes fierce, occasionally warm but always resolute.

‘Rajan,’ she repeated, ‘please—I’m concentrating.’

‘Yes, I can see you’re concentrating,’ he responded.

She looked up to see him trying not to smile.

‘This is actually quite hard. I know it’s not surgery, but it’s difficult to capture someone—their essence, as Master Baptist would say. You have to really know someone to paint them properly; otherwise you might as well just take their photograph. Paint has texture and tones. Master said with great paintings you feel like you’re looking at a living moment that will breathe forever because of the way the artist has painted it, even more than because of how the person has lived it. Master Baptist could have been a poet as well as an artist.’

Rajan relaxed his pose and looked directly at her. ‘Master Baptist is a drunkard. Now you’re quoting him about living moments and lecturing me on art? I knew we spent too long in the hill-country.’

‘Never mind,’ she said, hiding her face and her tears behind her canvas. ‘I’m almost finished for today. I just want to get your skin colour right so I can paint when you’re not here. And I need to sketch your mouth.’

‘My mouth?’ he repeated, self-consciously licking his lips.

‘Yes, your mouth, so if you could stop moving it that would be helpful,’ she retorted, not daring to peek out from behind the canvas.

‘We do need to talk about something,’ he replied, ignoring her instructions. ‘I spoke with your Amma yesterday, about Kamini. She’s twenty years old now.’

Nala’s younger sister finished school the year Appa died and for the last two years she had been studying home economics at a local college. Appa would have organised a marriage for her by now. He had some savings and a pension that Amma could live on, but she knew there was not enough to provide for the dowry and the wedding.