"The rightful place for an artist, his real world, is a pot of black ink. I believe it contains all the magic, all the forms, everything that human beings can imagine and render..." says Mithila artist Santhosh Kumar Das. In this poetic memoir of his growth into art, he pays a poignant tribute to the muses that transformed him into an artist - the greatest of them being his mother, along with the other women of the household who practised this originally female tradition of art.