This is the most famous Kalighat joke of all, painted plain: the cat wearing the pious sect-mark while clutching a stolen fish — the patuas' immortal jab at the holy man whose devotion ends exactly where his appetite begins. We kept it to a single profile animal so the contradiction is unmissable: the religious tilak on the brow above, the fat fish hugged to the chest below, nothing else to dilute it. The tabby's stripes are built with boneless grey strokes, the fish rendered with patua scale-lines, the one brick-red mark and ear giving the only heat. The plain ground is deliberate — the hypocrisy needs no stage, only the cat and its catch.