It is a long journey. The farmer returns home later afternoon after selling his produce in the village market. He returns with a bag of rice and a few unsold items. This is the hour of the day when he turns philosophical. The body is tired and the mind burdened with fear — fear that he won’t be able to repay the debts he made from the local moneylender. The shadows outside lengthen and spread over the fields. They will soon erase whatever traces of light still remain. The shadows within appear to follow them.

My drawing tools: Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils.

He makes bamboo laths or bamboo sticks (বাখারি in Bengali) by scraping, peeling and shaving off the skin of a bamboo pole. The surface undulations and nodes are shaved off making the piece of stick smoother and easier to use. The poles are then employed f0r various purposes, the most common being as a kind of yoke for carrying goods. The yokes are made with hanging cloth or string bags attached to both sides of a stick. These are then carried on the shoulder. The only tool of his trade is his chopper, an old sack cloth to sit on and a gamchha to dry his perspiration.

My tools: Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint black pen and Faber-Castell coloured pencils.

For this sketch of a dilapidated old fort, its moat and an abandoned mausoleum, I had no real-world models. The sketch is done with a Pilot V7 Hi-Tecpoint pen that had black ink in it and Camlin water colour paints. The ink in the Pilot Hi-Tecpoint is not waterproof though.