We briefed the saree-shop haggle as a marketplace ritual every Bengali household knows, set straight into Kalighat's gallery of salesmen and shoppers. The shopkeeper beams from the left in a white kurta, unfurling a red-bordered saree across a neat stack of folded ones, the cloth pouring down the centre of the picture in a single boneless fall. Opposite him a woman customer fingers the border with one hand and lifts the other to her chin, weighing the cloth and the price together in the universal posture of the buyer who will not be hurried. We composed them as a facing-pair so the unfurled saree itself becomes the third character, the thing they are both really looking at, and let the stacked sarees carry the only block of pattern against the plain ground. No shop sign, no brand, no price tag: the satire is the pitch, the fingered border and the deliberation.