Yakacha Dai once told me a story as he applied make-up on my face, preparing me for the newscast. He wanted to write it in the form of a play. This is how the story goes: A woman enters the workshop of a sculptor, a jyasaa somewhere in Patan. The sculptor sits on a suku mattress on the floor, bending over a large stone, hammering a chisel against it, cutting shapes. The stone makes soft peeling-breaking away sounds under the impact.

The woman enters the studio to catch the artist in one of his moments of confusion. Should the tendril curl upward and rest above the head of the deity or should it run parallel to the waist, highlighting the curves of the figurine? He can’t decide.

The woman wants to know if he will make her a statue; a bust of herself. For what purpose, she does not explain, but offers to pay. It’s the first time a woman, and someone living, has made such a request. He says he will.

In the days that follow, we see the sculptor consistently at work, a block of stone resting under his knees. The slant of light changes, suggesting the time of the day, as the work makes progress. The woman appears in the studio every few days and sits down on the mooda. Sometimes, the sculptor offers her tea and she will cup her hands around the glass tumbler, as though desperate to absorb some heat. She will only drink it minutes before leaving the studio, emptying the tumbler in a few gulps. The entire time, she sits talking to the sculptor. And always, the conversation is about how she’s always been very ‘ugly’. She has grown up feeling unwanted because she’s unattractive, and she hopes the sculptor will make her look a little better than her actual self. Maybe in the bust, she will be someone who is appreciated, unlike the person she is in real life, she says.

Some days, she recounts incidents from her childhood. Among all the children in the extended family, she was the least wanted, because she had crooked, stained teeth and unruly curls. Her eyes appeared disoriented behind her thick glasses. Her only reprieve, were moments spent staring at pretty photographs in the magazines she found in her aunt’s room. In them, she saw possibilities. There were possibilities in stories. In movies. Her uncle had once taken her to watch a Chinese movie with subtitles.It was about two blind individuals who fell in love through conversations. They traced one another’s face with their fingers and laughed and wept at the same time in the last scene. The woman told the sculptor, love ought to be like that—surreal.

Every time these meetings at the studio happen, a monologue gets underway. All the while, the sculptor keeps turning in his chisel, carving out the corners of the woman’s mouth, circling a curl against her temple, or beating the stone off to create the mound of her high cheekbones.

No one wanted to play with me, she says. She was not as fascinating as the others girls in her class, especially the one with thick eyelashes, pretty eyes and a pretty nose and pretty fingers and a pretty pencil box. The woman says hers was a tin geometry box. The kind boys carried: with a compass and a red and black, striped, Natraj pencil and a rabbit eraser that smelled like a fruit. So, childhood was about brave historical characters in text books, never afraid of the world the way she was. She remembers feeling nervous entering her own house some days, afraid of who she might encounter on the way up the staircase. Her bust would never have to worry about such things. But where would it sit? She didn’t know that yet.

On the days the woman visited, the sculptor could not sleep. He would run his mind over the details of the sculpture. The stone was evolving into a clean piece. He felt like he was infusing it with his own confidence as an artist, breathing his own convictions into it as he smoothened the tilt of its slight nose and redefined the corners of the eyes. The eyes had to be slanted like hers. Like the eyes of an elephant; unwilling to look the world in the eye and refraining from inflicting anyone hurt. The more his mindre-traced the carvings, the deeper his love grew for his own creation. The bust was more life-like than his other works, most of which were replicated from the designs in the ancient temples in the decadent city.

Yakacha Dai is done with my make-up. He always applies too much foundation and tries to enhance my plain looks, mixing in layers of shades that sit on his dresser. By the end of the act, I always look like a different person. A mannequin.Pretty. But it isn’t me. And as he delivers the finishing touches, the anger which has been building up, peaks. Why can’t he use subtle make-up instead of turning me into someone else? I begin to smudge the thick lines with cotton-wool.

So, what happens to the statue, I ask him. The sculptor refuses to sell it, he says. Why? I start. Because he loves what he has created. He sees it as an accurate interpretation of the woman and does not want someone who cannot see that to have it. So, when the woman returns the next day, he has put away the piece and is working on a new item. How can he do that? I’m a little annoyed. He can, says Yakacha Dai, looking away, packing his boxes of powder and sheen. It’s his work, so he can do what he likes with it, he says. Then he turns around and tells me to leave. It’s time to go on the air.