The artist woke up in the stil de grain of the morning and lay there looking out of the window till the light had stained the day a monk’s gamboge.

He lay perfectly still, considering the fact that this birthday might be his last one. The sky was cornsilk by the time the attendant came by to sit him up. He asked to visit the chapel. This would mean he would forego his habitual sitting. Many of the arrangements the attendant had spent the morning making, like arranging his paints and implements to his peculiar specifications, had now been rendered unnecessary. She conveyed this with a cursory pause in her by-now ritualised indifference. She pursed her lips and continued as before. He was momentarily embarrassed.

He was so old by now the atrophying fingers of his left hand could only retrace the swirls of his mind and failing eyesight on the canvas. Other forms and figures had dropped out of his cognitive framework. He saw them, but as irrelevant as a grill on a window that ceases to impose upon the everyday landscape just beyond. What the rest of his body felt, knew, drew upon, exuded, was extraneous to his fingers, which had retracted into a reclusive ecosystem of their own. He found himself locked on the outside of its orbit and was caught in the paradox of having to trust them with his art even as they failed his body repeatedly. He now needed another, an assistant, a well-wisher, a sponsor, a patron, a visiting fan, to wipe the drool that seeped out of the side of his mouth with a handkerchief, to lift him from and into his chair, or to guide him to the toilet. He had now become the shadow to the light in his paintings, a foil to whom he once was. He himself a play of impulse and indifference. He had forgotten if he was a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian, and which denomination if at all he was (of) any of these. He was not an atheist, of this he was sure for he retained some memory of a well-lived life and, in these times, even he knew, it was surely evidence of a benevolent god.