shown a dramatic improvement in her technique as she worked on a new subject, geckos. I wondered if this was a reflection of a sudden boost of self confidence akin to that of the child who realises that swimming isn't that difficult after all and plunges forward into the depths with feet off the bottom. Or maybe her progress was an indication of something else.After Esther's death - almost nine years ago now - it seemed that in the immediate aftermath of that horror and tragedy beauty had also died for me. I turned all the pictures in our home to face downwards and stopped playing music; the house that had been the scene of her last desperate act became doubly grim. My reaction echoed the experiences of the general medical practitioner I had consulted at the time. It so happened that his daughter had also taken her own life just a month or two before Esther and that loss had followed the murder of her mother some years previously. He told me that after his wife's death all the beauty had gone and he would look upon say a rose as being just another object.
I recall how a couple of weeks afterwards I had a very profound dream in which I was painting a landscape - one that I saw in vivid colour, light and shadow with the sun playing on the early morning dew. In the dream I turned to someone beside me and said "Isn't it beautiful?". I awoke from that dream realising that the beauty was still there; it was merely my perception that had become warped. I decided to work hard at correcting that distortion and that day returned the pictures to their rightful position and started playing classical music again - very loudly. And that jolt seemed to work for me.
It struck me that maybe the other day, after spending years inside the grim Indian circus, Chameli may have suddenly seen her handiwork turning into something that was attractive rather than just an assembly of hand cut tiles. Perhaps she too had re-discovered beauty.
