Arnab Gan Choudhury paints the goddess at his Lake Town home on Thursday, 12 years after Metro had featured him doing just that (right)

Kali Puja 2002: An eight-year-old boy engrossed in his maiden attempt at painting Goddess Kali, worshipped by the family for more than 200 years.

Kali Puja 2014: A second-year college student who has drawn portraits of several prominent personalities and made it a ritual to capture the family deity on his easel every Kali Puja.

Arnab Gan Choudhury, 20, had his first exhibition at the age of four, four years before he started painting Kali at the family’s Lake Town home.

“It was during Kali Puja one year that artists Ganesh Haloi, Niranjan Pradhan, Bimal Kundu and B.R. Panesar noticed him drawing on the terrace and throwing away the sheets,” recalled Tapash Gan Choudhury, Arnab’s father and an advocate in Calcutta High Court. “B.R. Panesar decided to take a closer look out of curiosity and saw what he was drawing. They then asked me to collect all that he draws as they wanted to have an experimental exhibition with his paintings.”

Of the 200 paintings submitted, 70 were selected for the exhibition in 1998.

Four years later, the prodigy took to painting Kali — a tradition that has continued every year at the Lake Town address.

What does he recall of Kali Puja 2002 when he had made it to the Metro pages as an eight-year-old? “The special thing I remember that day was making a painting of the goddess with pencil colours,” said Arnab, who was then in Class II at Don Bosco, Park Circus.

Now a BCom student of The Bhawanipur Education Society College, he has drawn portraits of former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, former governor M.K. Narayanan and Vice-President Hamid Ansari among others.

“When I see somebody I would want to draw, I take into account the bend of the nose, the eyebrows, the wrinkles or a particular feature and then I start sketching. Pictures are for reference,” Arnab said. He has had four exhibitions so far, three of them solos.

One wall of his “home studio” is occupied by a horse — an animal he started drawing during haate khori, a ritual to initiate a child into writing. The room is full of sketches of diverse heroes — from Swami Vivekananda to Diego Maradona, Sigmund Freud to Cesc Fabregas.

For Arnab, painting is a passion he wants to pursue all his life, though not as a profession, though he has never had any formal training. “He is completely self-taught because artists like Ganesh Haloi and Niranjan Pradhan had told me that training might spoil his individuality of expression,” said the young artist’s father.

The individualistic trait shows in Arnab’s depiction of the deity too. “I don’t make an exact replica but as my imagination perceives her.” He uses glass markers, pencil colours and watercolours and the entire painting takes him around two-and-a-half hours to complete.

The idol worshipped at the Lake Town house at present was carved out of touchstone by Niranjan Pradhan in 2005 and is modelled after the deity at Dakshineswar. Before that, the family would bring a new idol every year and immerse it after the puja. The over 260-year-old puja first started for the Gan Choudhurys in Burdwan before moving to Jessore in Bangladesh and then to Calcutta after Partition.

“This puja at our home gives me a huge sense of pride. People have different ways of showing their pride and gratitude. To paint the goddess is my way of showing my pride and gratitude. My father does the aarti which I cannot, I’d rather do what I am good at,” said Arnab, going back to his easel.

2014 pictures by Rashbehari Das and Amit Datta