One of my students, fourteen years old, was painting the fish motif from our Mithila tradition. She does very fine work for her age. Then she stopped and put down the brush and asked me, very politely, "Guru ji, why must the fish always look like fish? Why not make it my own way?"

I did not have a quick answer for her. That itself troubled me. I have been doing this since I was a small child sitting beside my mother. Nobody ever asked me that. The fish is the fish because it always has been. It carries meaning. It is auspicious.

But she is not wrong to ask. When I was learning, we drew from the memory of our mothers and grandmothers, not from any book. Every hand was a little different. My mother's fish were rounder than my grandmother's. So where does the tradition end and her own hand begin?

I told her to finish one fish the traditional way first. Then she may make another one her own way, and we will look at both together and see what remains that is still Mithila. I do not know yet what I will tell her if the second fish is unrecognisable. Some of the old ones would say the tradition is lost then. I myself am not so sure. She is the one who will carry it after I am gone.