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There's a salvage yard out past Kolbenova where I've been going for twenty years. The guy who runs it used to be suspicious of me, now he just shrugs when I show up with a flashlight and a crowbar. Yesterday I pulled out three kilograms of brass fittings from a hotel renovation, all tarnished, perfectly useless on their own, and I know exactly where every single one will go in the next room I'm building. What I'm saying is I think half my practice is just having a good eye for what other people have given up on. The other half is knowing how to wait, I've had pieces of scrap sit in the corner for four years before they told me what they wanted to be. My son says I'm running a museum of things nobody wanted. He's not wrong.

Went out this morning to sketch a house off Richmond Road, the kind with the curved verandah and teak columns, and found the demolition crew already there. Roof off, most of the back wall down. The foreman saw my sketchbook and just nodded at me like, yes, daily occurrence, get on with it. So I sat across the road and drew what was left. And honestly the strangest thing happened, the half-drawn house was more interesting to sketch than the whole one would have been. The brickwork where the plaster fell away, the exposed beams, the bathroom tiles still clinging to a wall that had no room behind it anymore. I was making this nice little study of a house mid-death and I felt awful about enjoying it. I looked up the property card later. 1948. That house was older than independence itself and I was out there enjoying the demolition like it was a landscape. I don't know what to do with this feeling. I'm glad I drew it. I also hate that I drew it. Both things are true and I can't decide if that makes me a documentarian or just someone watching the city fall down for entertainment. Anyway. Two studies done, both half-hearted and honestly better for it. Might pin them up side by side and see what the week makes of them.

Went back to my old street this morning because I heard they'd started demolition. The house we lived in till I was eighteen is gone already, just a pile of brick and those stupidly bright pink plaster chunks. But the last house at the end, the one with the bougainvillea that always looked like it was on fire, that one's still standing. The family came out and asked what I was doing, and I told them I used to live here. The woman offered me chai and I sat on their steps for an hour sketching the facade across the road. My own childhood home, and I'm drawing it from someone else's porch. The really strange part is how much I remembered wrong. The balcony I was so sure faced the main road, it faces the side lane. The window I thought was mine, wasn't even in our flat. I've been carrying this wrong mental map around for sixteen years and nobody ever corrected it because nobody ever asked. I keep painting these old houses as if I'm documenting them properly, but I can't even remember my own correctly. Maybe that's what the whole project actually is. A record of how unreliable I am. Anyway the chai was good. That house has maybe two weeks left.

I did one of those old Bangalore bungalow portraits for a family that's selling the place. They wanted it as a keepsake before the demolition. I quoted ₹6,000, felt generous about it, honestly, because it was for someone who was losing their childhood home and I wanted to be nice. Eleven hours. That's ₹545 an hour before the paper and the paints, which for good watercolour paper and decent pigment is maybe another ₹800-1000. So call it ₹480 an hour. And I know the family was happy, and I know some of you will say stop undervaluing yourself, and I know all of that is true. But the thing is, I also know if I'd quoted ₹15,000 they'd have found someone else, or gone to one of those digital artists on Instagram who does it for ₹2,000. There's this whole tier of people who genuinely cannot tell my work from the cheap version, and that's the part I don't have a fix for. Still, I did the math on a napkin after I delivered it and sat there for a full minute. I don't even know what the answer is. I just wanted it written down somewhere.

Someone asked me to paint their family home before the demolition crew moves in. Legacy piece, three generations of their family grew up there. I quoted them a price and only after sending it did I realise I hadn't charged anything for the emotional weight of it. Just paper, paint, and my hours. And honestly? I'd do it again. That house gets torn down next month and the only record of it will be my painting hanging in their new flat. How do you bill for that? You don't. You price what it costs you and quietly accept that the rest is unpaid work you chose. Still, I keep thinking about the architect salary I walked away from. This is the trade I made, na. Some days it feels like a bad one.

I painted this old house on Wheeler Road maybe three weeks back. One of those 60s bungalows, the kind with the deep verandah and the latticed jali bricks above the door. Sat on the footpath across the road for an hour, the owner's son came out and asked if I was doing it for a project. I said no, just because it's beautiful. He said, "Oh. We're demolishing it next month." Went past today while running an errand. The chajja is already gone. The jali bricks are in a pile by the gate. It took them a week. I have the painting. That's something. But it's sitting in my studio and I keep looking at it and thinking I got the proportions of that verandah slightly wrong, and now there's no building left to go check against. So it just stays wrong forever. That's the part that's bothering me more than the demolition, honestly. That I'll never know if it was my eye or the light. Do other people here live with that? The painting becoming the only record, and no way to verify it?

I've started judging found material by smell before I even look at it. Wood that's been in a damp cellar for twenty years has a particular must that nothing cleans off and nothing fakes. When I walk into a demolition site and catch that, I know the rest of the haul is worth my afternoon. Today a guy in Žižkov called me about an old workshop being torn out. Rotten oak workbench, some lathe parts, a drawer full of bent screwdrivers. I went because the stairwell smelled like my grandfather's garage. Brought home more than I can fit in the studio. The screwdrivers I'll use for years, the bench becomes part of the next room. People think I'm picky about aesthetics. No. I'm picky about history that you can breathe in. You can't fake that with new material, no matter how you treat the surface. The grime has to have earned itself.

Went back to that old compound on the Basavanagudi road this morning and the gate was open for once, workers loading rubble. The wall I've sketched at least four times this year, the one with the bougainvillea growing right through the crack in the plaster, it's half gone. They let me stand there and finish anyway. Drew the remaining half and the gap where the other half used to be, because that's what was actually there. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these. I have a whole pile of paintings of buildings that are now just dust and a bigger pile of ones I keep meaning to go back to before that happens. The sketch I did today is the first one where the building isn't there anymore while I'm painting it. Strange feeling. Half grief, half relief that I got there in time for at least half of it. Anyway. The dust from demolition does terrible things to watercolour if you're not careful. Note to self: keep a cloth in the bag, not just the one for brushes.

I have this column of stacked window frames I rescued from a demolition in Žižkov. Old ones, painted maybe seven times, each coat a different decade peeking through. I've been working it for months and every time I add something it gets better, which sounds great until you realize it means the piece has no end in it. I can't find the point where adding another one ruins it. Usually I know that line by now, I've hit it enough times, ruined enough things. Not this one. I think the problem is the material. The frames are doing all the work, all that layered paint and the warped sashes, and I'm just arranging good luck. So the piece never resolves, it just keeps being more of what it already is. That's a different failure than the usual one. With a bad piece you know where you went wrong. This one is all going right, which is somehow worse. Anyone else had a piece that won't close because it won't stop working? I'd rather it fail so I could fix it.

I was pulling rotten timber out of a skip behind a demolition site and there it was, buried under plasterboard. Old Czech welding mask, the glass is green-black and pitted, the leather's stiff as a board. Cost me nothing. It's sitting on a shelf now, facing the wall, and it's got more presence than half the things I've paid good money for. I don't know what it's going to become yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe I'll spend a month figuring out how to use it and then I won't. That's the part of the process nobody talks about, the sitting around, the letting things decide what they want to be. My assistant asked me yesterday what I was doing with it. I said I was waiting. He didn't get it. Most people don't. But you people probably do.

There's this old bungalow off Cubbon Road, been meaning to sketch it for months, kept putting it off. Yesterday my husband told me they've started demolition. I went this morning anyway and sat across the street and painted it while the JCB was just sitting there idle, like even the machine was waiting for something. The painting's not great. I was rushing, and my hand was shaking a bit, and the proportions are off because I kept looking up at the windows thinking this is the last time anyone's going to draw these. It's finished but I don't know what to do with it. Don't want to post it, don't want to throw it. Just sat here staring at it with my chai going cold. Is this just what it means to document a city? You're basically making funeral portraits and calling it a practice?