But wooing the common viewer can be risky business. After some time, the quiet exuberance of these images begin to settle, the loveliness lingers on, but the eye does not long to return to the paintings. Mohandas, who is gifted with a refined sensibility, should not worry too much about accessibility, about keeping it all too simple all the time. (The poet Geoffrey Hill famously said, “Public toilets have a duty to be accessible, poetry does not.”)

Browsing through the few sketchbooks of the artist displayed in the rooms, one is struck by the endless bird-shapes that fill up the pages. Avian moments, their themes and variations, are captured in precise detail — fluttering birds, twittering birds, birds taking flight, sprawled in the morning sun, perched on the terrace or pecking, even defecating. Interrupting this birdscape are still-life studies painted with consummate skill. There are startling deviations: Che Guevara stares out of a surrounding parliament of fidgety fowls.

What remains, within and beyond these images, is a conscious mastery of technique, a few tentative lines transforming themselves into perfect figures. The journey from the blank page to the finished work (as in the panoramic diptych of pigeons on the terrace) shows this leap of imagination tellingly. “What an artist paints,” Mohandas observes, “is of less significance than how he paints.” This “how” involves absorption in the here and the now, the ability to “search, question, work, observe, wait”, in the words of Pablo Neruda, whose poems punctuate the catalogue.

An array of visual delights emerges from such inner workings. Most arresting are the scenes in the parks: men lolling in the afternoon haze with myriad expressions on their faces. They doze off, chew paan, unselfconscious about their bodies, smiling, scheming, playing out their private fantasies in public. This is Familiar India, as much part of our daily lives as of Art. Such moments hark back to the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar or Sudhir Patwardhan, but with their mysterious and mystical dimensions missing.