Moonlight on a terrace in Bengal

The girl with the fan has been waving it since the moon was over the trees, and her arm has stopped belonging to her.

It is a beautiful fan, she will give it that: a stiff crimson flag on a stick, worked with tiny patterns, and every stroke sends a little breath of air down over the couch under the canopy. The canopy is white, its edges hanging in neat folds, held up on slim gold poles topped with points like spear tips. Beneath it the master lies propped on his elbow on a long cushion patterned in red and gold, a hookah pipe trailing from his hand, its red tube looping across the white floor to the bowl. Behind him, a woman in a gold cap reclines with her cheek on her palm, watching what he is watching.

What they are watching is at the far end of the terrace. Two young women have stopped by the railing, close together, veils drifting. One leans in and murmurs something; the other has turned her face away and toward her at once. Whatever is being said, the girl with the fan cannot hear it, and so she does what everyone on the terrace is doing. She waits to see whether they will come nearer.

On the floor between them lie the remains of the evening: a covered gold dish, a little plate of oranges, green leaves on a dish, slender bottles, a box. Above the dark line of trees the moon stands round and white, and lower, over the grey expanse beyond the lattice, floats a second, paler disc, perhaps its reflection in water. The night is painted a deep velvety grey. Nothing but the faces and jewels is lit, and the white marble, which takes the moon’s light and holds it.

The artist is unknown. The museum suggests the page was made in the eighteenth century, possibly at Murshidabad in Bengal, then the seat of the region’s nawabs. The painted scene is about seventeen by twenty-four centimetres, opaque watercolour with gold on paper, set in gold-ruled borders on a mount flecked with more gold: a page made to be held in the hands, perhaps by lamplight on a terrace not unlike this one.

The two women at the railing have still not decided. The fan goes on.

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