There is one nib for the fine black line that I have been using since 2011, cut from a bamboo stick by my own hand. Every few months I trim it with a blade and it becomes a little shorter. Now it is hardly two inches, my fingers sit almost on the paper, and my son says Ramesh ji just buy new one, it is a stick only. But a new one takes some days to become mine. It scratches wrong on the first hundred lines. The old one already knows how much pressure a fish scale needs and how much a hair of the peacock.

Some of the younger girls I teach do the opposite, they come with a whole bundle of nibs and choose one fresh each day. Their line is clean but I feel it is not yet theirs.

I am not telling anyone to hoard old things. Only that the hand learns the tool, and the tool learns the hand also. Today I did the border of a Kohbar panel, around four hundred small lines, and the nib did not once catch. If I change it now, that border will not match the next one.

Myself Ramesh, Madhubani, Bihar. This is the small thing on my mind this week.