We briefed the hature daktar as Kalighat's old contempt for false experts brought to the neighbourhood clinic — the patuas always loved to skewer the self-serving professional. He beams from the left in a grey coat with a stethoscope slung for show, a gold watch and rings flashing, holding up a blue tonic bottle and pointing at it with a salesman's grin, every inch the man who has the cure before he has the diagnosis. Opposite him a thin patient stands with a hand to his chin, brows drawn, the ordinary worried Bengali weighing a promise he half-believes. We set a low brown stool between them carrying a syringe, a small bottle and a scatter of prescription papers — the props of plausibility — and kept the palette to grey, white and the single blue of the bottle so the tonic reads as the picture's bait. No clinic sign, no brand, no logo: the satire is the grin, the bottle and the doubt.