Families have their secrets and treasures. Some of the secrets might be a source of shame, and might even be known to only one or two of the family members; the treasures can be a cause for continuing pride, and also pulse with disappointments, as reputations dwindle and promise remains unfulfilled. The family, then, becomes a site that struggles, through its folklore and memories, against the amnesia of history. Marriage is an exchange of these treasures and secrets. The principal treasure in my wife's family is the painter, Sudhir Khastgir (1907-1974). Some time before we were married, my wife told me that her grandfather, Satish Ranjan Khastgir, the distinguished physicist, had a younger brother, a painter whose work she liked very much. I hadn't heard the name before, but when I repeated it to my parents, they spoke of him admiringly, although they said they hadn't seen his paintings in a long time. In a couple of generations, the reputation had faded; the family's treasure had become one of its secrets. The first time I saw a Sudhir Khastgir painting was in 1991, when my wife took me to Shantiniketan a few months before our wedding. She wanted me to see her grandfather's house in Purba Palli, with its courtyard of jhau trees, and amloki, custard-apple and other trees in the orchard at the back. It was a house she used to dream about even then. We went there in the summer; it was end of term in Oxford, where we had met about eight months ago. She showed me the faint Bengali lettering by the gate, which spelt 'Subhoshree', the name her grandfather had given her, before her grandmother gave her the name I had first known her by, Rosinka. One looks upon one's wife's family with a mixture of curiosity, tenderness and a certain lack of indulgence. I remember being disappointed by this house, the house my wife still visited in her dreams. It was in decay, and soon to be sold. Shantiniketan itself was dead, a place with a history but no present, to which retired people moved and where the rich built winter retreats, but otherwise without life or purpose; and we had the summer to contend with by day, and the lack of electricity by night. The bathroom was in disrepair, and I bathed in cold water collected in a pail, the first time I did so in almost two decades. Some of my wife's grandmother's things were still here (she had lived here after her husband died, and once fractured her femur), among them a wide bedpan made for people with osteopathic problems. When my mother was a girl, she might have come to Shantiniketan, and learnt singing; she might have met Tagore. (She has one of the most perfect singing voices I have heard, and is a respected artiste in her own right.) But that was not to be; her father died when she was a child, and the family fell into straitened circumstances, and lacked the means to send her anywhere outside the Sylhet and Shillong in which she grew up. Who knows; if she had come to Shantiniketan and entered its magic circle her pitch-perfect voice might be heard more widely today. But Shantiniketan, which gave Bengal some singers, remained out of reach for some others, like my mother. Now, on this visit, I saw how Shantiniketan had become a small town of no particular distinction; how it was struggling for visibility, as my mother had when she was a young woman; history had come full circle. We ate with my wife's aunt, Shyamoli Khastgir, the artist's daughter, in her house in Purba Palli, not far from where we were. She had been married to Lee Tan, architect and son of the man who was once head of China Bhavan, from whom she was now separated; she herself was an environmental activist, and was convinced technology was taking the world towards its own destruction. Around us, scattered on the floor or leaning against walls, were the works of the painter to whom I felt, uncomfortably, I was about to be related by an imminent marriage. My immediate impression of his work was that it was different from anything I'd seen before, and that it diverged strikingly from much of the painting of the Bengal school. For one thing, the medium was oil; and the work had little of the nostalgic meditativeness of the Bengal school painting. A large painting of the Buddha confronted me; yet it had not been executed in the expected (given the subject) delicate Far Eastern or Japanese style which the illustrious Bengali masters frequently dabbled in, but boldly, in oil; this Buddha looked like a hero, or a great actor. It began to rain around us, the lights were switched on, and when I looked at the face, it seemed as if it were illuminated by stage lights. That night, we slept without electricity behind a mosquito net; my wife's aunt slept in the next room, our custodian, the door between us open. In the morning, my wife showed me the accessories of her grandparents' lives, the table where her grandfather worked, the old grandfather clock, none of which she would actually see again in that setting; and nor would I. Among the things she showed me was a painting in a rudimentary frame that had been gathering dust, of two branches of palash flowers, by her grand-uncle, a painting she told me she had always loved. This was gifted to her later by her father after the house was sold, and now hangs, in a new frame, on a wall in our flat. Again, it is a startling picture, the brush strokes rapid and unhesitant and almost reminiscent of Van Gogh; yet the flower depicted in it is the untranslatable, Tagorean palash, redolent of Bolpur and Bengal. But the painting has none of that stillness or lyrical inwardness that the landscape studies of the Bengal school often have; like the portrait of the Buddha, it is a theatrical work, and the branch of palash is a protagonist, rather than a detail alluded to or briefly touched upon. Over the years, I have absorbed, and come to have a high regard for, the individuality and power of this painter's genius. One misses him in exhibitions; he was a great and unremarked absence in the Art of Bengal exhibition at the CIMA gallery; I find him, instead, in people's homes, and three or four of his paintings hang on the walls of my parents-in-law's flat in Mandeville Gardens. One of them is a picture of a waterfall by a gulmohur tree; all the other pictures have magnificently drawn dancing figures in them. Among them is a painting of a couple, a frontal view of a man and a woman, dancing, their arms outstretched, their hands poised in a mudra, the urgent brush strokes making them shimmer as they move sideways. The background is dark; but there is a light in the painting which feels not so much like moonlight as the lighting on a stage, especially since the faces of the figures are made bright, seemingly, by a source of light before them. When my mother-in-law saw this painting after her marriage, she apparently said to the painter, 'You must have been thinking of the lines, 'Premero jowaare bhashabe dohare' when you painted this', quoting from a song from Tagore's dance-drama, Shyama; and the painter was sufficiently pleased by the identification to give her the painting. The lines are not easy to translate: 'You will set these two adrift/ Upon the high tide of love.' The lines, with their invocation of 'high tide' and of 'casting adrift', are as much about the onward motion and stream of actions that are the substance of theatre as they are about love. The anecdote suggests to me what I have come to feel about Sudhir Khastgir's imagination: that it was suffused with the world of theatre, the Tagore dance-drama, and music; that is, the world of performance. Even his landscapes, in the vigorous movement which is their true subject, seem to allude to the flux and hurry of the stage. This interest was confirmed to me when I was told by his family that he was a singer, and that he also directed some of Tagore's dance-dramas when he was an art teacher in Dehradun. In situating his art in the metaphor of performance, he seems almost unique among Indian painters of his time. He is, in effect, an artist who has rebelled against his art; for the impulse of the painting is to record a scene and preserve it for eternity, while the impulse of performance is to race to its conclusion, so that it may begin, on another occasion, again. Art is timeless, still, and eternal; performance is transient, mobile, and recurrent. To discover how these two opposing impulses converge in the genius of one artist, we must view Sudhir Khastgir's singular paintings again.