We briefed this straight off Kalighat's 19th-century gift for sketching power and money in two bodies and nothing else. The landlord is built the way the old patuas built their prosperous babus — a heavy boneless curve of belly, jowls, a brick-red shawl thrown over one shoulder and the account-ledger held like a weapon — while the tenant is all stoop and shrinking line, tugging his chequered lungi as if the cloth could pay. We composed them as a facing-pair across an empty centre so the held-out palm and the anxious hands carry the whole joke without a single prop between them. The palette stays to white, brick red and one cool chequered indigo precisely so the eye reads bulk-versus-thinness before it reads anything else, and we refused a desk, a door, or a rupee note because the satire has to live in the postures. The single gold earring and finger-ring are the only ornament — the patua's shorthand for who in this picture has money.