India: A Million Mutinies Now - pg. 109

Char and I got ready to leave. And now many of the details of the house had a fulle rmeaning: the photographs of Malika's father and mother, the color snaps of Namdeo, the red flag (made by Mallika's son) in the front room, the dark, shadow-like, silent figure of Namdeo's mother who had had a breakdown many years before (and was about to die now), the framed certificate to Namdeo from the Bombay Russian House of Culture, the icon-picture of Dr Ambedkar, the poster for the prostitutes' meeting Namdeo was planning. On one wall, above the very big colour photograph of a white baby (Mallika said she simply liked the picture) there was a framed drawing by her son: brown rocks, black boulder, red sun, black birds. In the up-and-down scratching of the brown crayon, which had given volume and solidity to the rocks, I had seen a great subtlety, and had thought that the picture was a contemporary Chinese print.