3.45 am.

Nirmalendu, dead and gone. The day he died, I didn’t feel a thing. I started a sketch with Chinese ink. I copied it from a drawing on an old, fading postcard; the drawing accompanied by two rows of Chinese calligraphy. Such complicated beauty. It was a swimming suit catalogue: the postcard rested between two babes in bikinis. It was a drawing of bamboo stalks; vivid in the foreground, dull and faint in the background. I didn’t feel a thing. I looked for a plain piece of paper; there was none. Only the ruled college notebooks. I drew on the first empty page. I loved Chinese ink. I loved the way it dries on a page with such certainty, the multiple shades it produces, the smell, the ease with which it leaks from the strands of the brush. I concluded my first stalk of bamboo. Rather powerless strokes, certain but gentle – the resulting colour was brown. Reddish brown. The purple-black of the ink and the almost-yellow of the paper. All this and Nirmalendu dead. I dipped my brush into the glass, the tip pressing against water and the gloom of the ink snaked in; it coiled and traveled down, down to the bottom of the glass and it coated the water. Gloom hugged the water; the water like a sheet, soaked, every bit of it, in black. And I wept.