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People ask what colour I use for the black, thinking I will give some shop name. But it is not from any shop. It is soot collected from the clay diya in the puja room, the one that burns through the evening. My mother kept a small brass bowl near it and once in some days she would wipe the inside and that black would go into the bowl. Then with a few drops of gum from the neem tree it becomes the line. The line for the eyes of the kohbar, the fine fish scales, all of it. I have that bowl here. This morning the level was low, so I lit the diya early and sat doing the border of a kohbar piece for a wedding order in Patna while it collected. Only a small amount came. That is the thing with this black, you cannot hurry it, you cannot order it in bulk. If I run out in the middle of a face, the whole face waits. My son says just buy the black paint, Amma is not here now to see. But the brush behaves differently with the soot, it holds. Also the black from the tube has a shine to it, and this should be matte, like the wall of the house. I do not know how to explain it to anyone who has not grown up seeing both. Anyway today I am short of it and there is one more peacock to do. So the peacock also waits.

Two months back a shop in Patna approached me, they wanted twelve paintings of peacock and fish for their wall, same size, same border, all to be delivered in five weeks. They said 4,000 rupees per piece, take it or leave it, because "it is folk art only, no?". I did the sum that night on the back of an old paper. Handmade paper comes to near 400 for that size, colours I make myself but still the gum and the stone grinding takes days, and one painting of that size with fine line takes me not less than three days if my eyes are cooperating. Twelve of them in five weeks means I am not sleeping and I am not teaching the girls who come on Sunday. So it was not 4,000 for a painting, it was 4,000 for three days and a piece of my name on their wall. I said no. My son said I am mad, that a shop order means regular income. He is not wrong in the account book sense. But this same shop will sell it to a customer in Delhi for fifteen or twenty thousand and put a small card saying "Madhubani, Bihar" and my name will not be on the card. Here is what I want to ask the people in this group who have gone through such talks. When a buyer says the price is fixed but the quantity is good, do you hold your number and lose the order, or do you name a price for the bulk and keep the fine line thinner, less work, honest about it? I have done both in my life and I am still not sure which one keeps the art alive and which one only keeps the kitchen running. 🙏