Salaam from India. I hope you are doing well, which I can well imagine you are, considering that at your age there is so much little that one needs and there is just so much that you already have. Well, to be honest, I have been wanting to write you for some time but I was confused about where to send you the mail, as some said that you were a royal guest in UAE, while a few contested that you were put up in London and the rest assured me that you were very much on your way to India.  It was not until that you took up residency in Qatar, that I wasn’t sure of your precise location. In fact, it is about this precise location that I wanted to talk to you about.

Let me first make an honest confession, I am a great fan of yours and your work. Even though, I cannot imagine ever being able to own a Husain piece (and so do probably 99.99999 crores of Indians), yet there is an unknownaffinity that pulls us to your canvass or any piece that you touch including tablecloths, handkerchiefs and even walls. Probably, it was exclusivity of your work that made it so valuable to us. Sotheby used to auction your work for millions of Dollah. I well remember there was this industrialist that had commissioned a hundred paintings from you for some Rs. 100 crore. Now, it is not every day that a painter gets that kind of money, do they? We all Indians were awed and intimidated by your paintings, even if those stark and blurry figurines did not make any sense.

Also, there was a personal connect for me. In most of your paintings that I chanced across in various magazines, etc. your favourite motif was the horse. White, black, yellow, purple horse with open jaws or mouth shut, galloping or standing still. Even when there was no need for a horse in your painting, there would always be one. For instance, in one of the paintings your muse Madhuri was naked and straddling your motif, a horse. Now that was certainly hard to imagine, considering that Madhuri would never ever ride a horse like that. Nevertheless, I share with you the passion for horses. As a kid, I remember my father taking us to Juhu Chowpatty, I used to love the horses there and would lug at my dad’s shirt asking for a horse ride or even two. Some years later, they stopped horses and camels on the beach, and yet I still loved them and would gallop on an invisible horse often when I was alone. So you see from that time on, I have been very impressed by horses.