"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 Santosh Kumar Das. In this poetic and conceptually rich memoir of his growth into art, he pays a poignant tribute to the muses that led him to becoming an artist--the greatest of them being his mother, along with the other women of the household who practised this originally female tradition. The book has been screenprinted on black black recycled paper and bound by hand.