Sohrai is the harvest and cattle festival of the Santhal and their neighbours in Jharkhand. Before it, every house is re-plastered in mud and dung and the women paint the walls again — cattle, birds and climbing vine drawn in locally dug pigment with fingers, a cloth swab and a chewed twig.

The mural is a seasonal layer: made once a year, weathered away once a year, never copied twice. This system takes the plaster as the page and the pigment as the drawing, with every contour carrying the tremor of the hand that laid it.