How long had the grandfather been painting the picture?

Leela's grandfather had been painting the same picture for eleven years: a view of the hills from the window of his room, with the river at the bottom and the temple on the ridge.

It was never finished. Every few months he would add a tree, or paint out a cloud, or change the colour of the river from blue to grey and then, after the monsoon, back to blue. When visitors asked when it would be done, he said, "When the hills stop changing."

After he died, the family decided to sell the house. Leela's uncle wanted to throw the painting away, since it was unfinished and nobody would buy it. Leela asked if she could keep it.

She hung it in her room in the city, which had a window that looked out on a car park and a water tank. For a long time she did not touch it.

Then, one evening, she noticed that the light in the painting was wrong. It was morning light, the light of the old room, and it was evening where she was. She took out the old man's paints, which she had kept in a shoebox, and very carefully, with the smallest brush, she painted the sky a little warmer.

It was the first thing she had added. It would not be the last.