Five bulbs in a row, and each one is drawn less than the one before it. The first has its screw cap and a full yellow body. By the fifth there are a few marks of yellow and little else. They sit on a scribbled line, and a figure in blue at the lower left is turned towards them.

It is signed and dated in the lower right corner. The date reads 2008. The name is harder to read.

The wall it hung on is a different matter. Jim Masselos came to Bombay in 1961 on a Colombo Plan scholarship, took his doctorate at the University of Bombay in 1964, and then taught Indian history at the University of Sydney for forty-four years. He wrote the standard account of how the nationalist associations began in Bombay and Poona, and after the riots of 1992 he went back to the riots of 1893 to show that communal violence worked street by street. He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and one of the few foreign members of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai.

He collected the whole time. Kutchi embroidery, pichwai, miniatures, a dancing Nataraj, a Tyeb Mehta, and later Australian Indigenous painting. He worked with Marg and with B. N. Goswamy and he showed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the mid nineteen nineties. A colleague who visited him described a house with Royal Commission reports stacked on the floors, so that you had to skip and jump to find a seat, and art on every wall. He bought his books off the pavement near Flora Fountain. He died in Sydney in June 2025, three years after forty-eight of those books went to the Fisher Library at his own university.

A picture that man chose to live with, and the only thing missing is an attribution.