IT is a Sunday morning. I am at home baby-sitting for my sister. Zahra, my niece, is lying on the floor colouring pictures, and I... what else but turning out the wardrobe. When the door-bell rings, ominously. I am not expecting visitors. And even if I am, a barefoot Maqbool Fida Husain dressed nattily for Saturday night, but looking like he's just come from the bazaar with a theli of groceries in hand, is the last man on my Sunday callers' list. I watch dumbfounded as the master painter walks familiarly in and proceeds to dump the bag on my kitchen table with a thud. He is followed by his favourite daughter Raessa. And Raessa denies me the privilege of asking Husain to what do I owe the pleasure (and surprise!) of this visit. She says, "Baba was in Delhi. And there, winter has already set in. He spotted these lassans in the market and remembered that two years ago he had promised to cook for you his famous Kheema-Lassan dish. With Baba, to think is to act. He caught the next, early morning flight to Bombay with the lassans in hand, picked me up on the way from the airport, made another stop at Grant Road market for the ingredients and spices, and here we are... ready to cook Kheema-Lassan for lunch!"

�Baba� is nodding his head and darting looks around my kitchen vaguely. I peer into his theli. Husain has purchased from the kirana ka dukkan just about enough of all the spices and masalas he will need for this one-dish meal. They are packed in tightly-screwed up paper pudis. And there's the lassan, garlicky fresh, leafy and smelling of the fields of North India. "Haven't you forgotten the main item," I ask. "What," he replies unperturbed. "The kheema!" He pushes back his silvery hair dismissively, "Oh that, that I have ordered... woh to abhi aajayenga!" And come it does. Along with Husain's grandson and two great-grandchildren who immediately make Zahra's aquaintance. Raessa explains the children: "Baba thought that since it is such a rare occasion for him to be cooking, it might not be a bad idea for his great-grandchildren to taste his food." I nod uncertainly. Meanwhile, �Baba� is checking out my kitchen. In a distracted manner, as if one part of the mind is on some unfinished painting of Madhuri Dixit, he strokes his beard and reaches out for a spoon. Then he stops. "Ek cup chai ho jaye?" he asks inquiringly. "Irani-walli," he commands, and gallops out of the kitchen just when I thought he was going to be making it.

Husain, I realise, is lovably, delightfully, maddeningly eccentric. Here it is lunch-time, he has come to cook me his signature dish, and then suddenly he is in the mood for tea! Fortunately, my maid Sunita is at hand. And while she busies herself getting tea, Hussain wanders around my apartment and comes to halt by my wall of art. It is the one wall at home that I have devoted exclusively to paintings. There are five. Two are his own, one is by another old world eccentric artist, Francis Newton Souza, and there's one by my friend, Mario de Miranda. There is also one of flowers done by me for my husband Behram before we got married. Hussain peers at the paintings short-sightedly, then moves into the hall.

After dragging his feet about listlessly, he plonks himself on my rocking chair in anticipation of the tea. "I like it made to proportion," he tells me of the chai. "The correct amount of tea leaves, water, sugar and milk. And I like only half-filled cups. Full cups of tea, like plates overflowing with food, turn me off. My appetite goes. The cup of tea loses its form, its aesthetics. Look at Japanese food. Ah, what delicate, aesthetic proportions, what presentations. But the food is bland!" As Sunita walks in with his cuppa, Husain is telling me that times he enters people's kitchens and shows them how to make the perfect cup. I heave a sigh of relief to find that Sunita, in her wisdom, has poured the great artist only a half-cup of chai. He finishes his tea and comes prancing into the kitchen. This is Husain like I have never seen him, never known him, before. I understand he got his adventurous tastebuds from his father, Fida Husain, who was a great cook and a most discerning gourmet. His father loved the fine arts as well. And he encouraged Husain to take up painting at a time when the only painters who were making money were those doing portraits for the last of India's maharajas and royal families. Husain has been painting from the age of six. He admits this left him with time for nothing else. "All the time, I used to be painting, painting," he says. "No time for even games. I am used to painting 24 hours a day, 10, 12 hours non-stop. Even today." And at 86, he is energy-plus and then some more. Maybe if he had devoted time to cooking, he would have made a great chef? "Oh, yes, sawaal hi nahi," he replies, eyes twinkling behind the sun-shades.

The kheema, finely chopped by hand, and not minced by a machine, is simmering on a high flame along with golden-fried onions, garlic and ginger paste. Husain, after nimbly slipping into my apron which has been hanging on a peg in the kitchen, has spread out his purchases on the table. Small scrounged up paper packets containing the spices that go into his Kheema-Lassan. And he is picking up portions of jeera, dhania, red chilli powder and salt and preparing to toss them into the pan of kheema. He makes this winter dish by memory. There is no cookery book to follow, no standard recipe to be guided by, and even the portions of ingredients that go into its making he is vague about. Typical of the man, he does not understand grams and ounces, he will not be bound by measurements of tablespoons and cups. His measure is his palm. Large, smooth and almost without any lines.

And his magical cooking abilities lie in his long and artistic fingers with which he now rolls out what he calls the "Parwali Roti". I watch in surprise as he uses elegant wrists to dexterously toss them in the air before and after frying. He breaks the rotis in mid-air with his palms, so that the dough splits and the roti is cooked in layers. It is an old Lucknow habit and one that I am familiar with, but which I haven't seen being practised in ages. I am amazed to see Husain employ it now. I realise he has a skill for making rotis that is born of long practise. He tells me, "For 15 years, I used to make the rotis at home for 14 people every day. I can do this in my sleep."

His cooking influences are most definitely Mughlai. He admits to having a fondness for the royal cuisine of the nawabs of Lucknow and Hyderabad. "What exquisite food," he tells me, "and which you will only get in people's homes in these old cities today. Not in restaurants." He is of the opinion that the introduction of the tandoor to Indian restaurants in the 1950s spoilt our eating habits. "The delicacies of the cuisines of Hyderabadi and Lucknowi traditional homes has been lost by this madness for strong and heavy masalas in Indian food now," he complains. "I crave the subtly flavoured foods of Hyderabad and Lucknow. What artistic combinations of the north and south! What gentle reminders that these foods are also influenced by Iran and Turkey. Have you tasted Motanjan, the Persian marrow biryani? No! A delicious and deadly dish of layers of rice with marrow on top. It is cooked on slow heat. On coals. It is given dum."

Those kinds of meals, Husain says, come under the tidings of exquisite food in his book. "The kind I like. I'm choosy. Give me good food, give me good music, then watch how I function on canvas! My brush will move according to the beat of the music and to the lingering tastes of that exquisite meal. It is sheer joy!" he exclaims in delight. "But now, people in India don't know how to eat. In the South, they can put away mounds of rice and gallons of rasam! And they must have pickles! I never ask for pickles. If anybody offers me pickles, then I know the food is tasteless! After the South, there are the Gujaratis! They must have ten types of chutneys with everything they eat! How bland Gujarati food is!"

His personal favourite foods, apart from the Kheema-Lassan that is nearning completition in my kitchen, are dishes like Kheema-Methi and Jowarfali with Shrimps. "But this is a Maharashtrian dish," I say. And Husain looks at me in surprise. "But I am Maharashtrian," he says almost with a touch of exasperation. "I was born in Pandharpur. I speak Marathi. I love Maharashtrian food. Sukha Bombil! What a stink! But what an acquired taste. I dream for somebody to make me a bajra-roti-thecha meal. Know what is thecha? The red chilli-garlic chutney that is consumed with onion and bajra rotis by farmers as the mid-day meal. I used to have it packed up as a child when I was travelling and eat it on the train. And Maharashtrian sukha mutton. Best mutton you can get in Bombay is in those small thali restaurants in Girgaum. This is Gomantak-style cooking. What food!"

Interestingly enough, he recalls that his first major payment for a painting came in the form of food. He tells the story. "I was a struggling painter before marriage, doing posters for Hindi films and living in Badr Bagh at Grant Road in Bombay. I used to earn six annas a day out of which I spent five paise on a meal at this Husaini Dhabha on Foras Street where Delhi Darbar is now. Nothing much to eat, khichdi, dal and kadi. Then one day the dhabawala asked me to paint a portrait of his mother who used to sit at the counter. She had never had a picture taken and was old and getting on in age. I remembered my own mother had passed away without leaving behind any photographic memory. So I painted the dhabawala's mother. And in payment, he gave me free meals at the dhabha for a month!"

The Kheema-Lassan is ready now and he pours a small dish of bubbling ghee onto it, making it sizzle like mad, and bringing out the aroma of the kheema and the lassan. It is deliciously, tantalisingly wonderful, and Raessa, the children and I crowd the kitchen eager to get our share. Husain rolls out the last of his Parwali Rotis and then slips off my apron. He looks up and smiles tiredly. "Khana taiyar hai," he announces. And there is a clamour for chairs at the table. Zahra and his great-grandchildren, Husain lifts up and places on the kitchen counter, where he feeds them the first morsels of his signature dish. His work over, the master painter is now looking into what I had originally planned to have for my lunch. Dal-chawal-sabzi. He asks for it to be warmed, then fills his plate, and gets down to eating with a hearty gusto.

I watch him delicately roll the roti in the kheema and make a niwala, a small mouthful of food, his prized fingers going about the task as if he were mixing the oils for his next painting. And then, the same fingers making a mish-mash of the dal-chawal and sabzi. But a few mouthfuls later, Husain pushes the chair back and leaves the table. "I wish I could eat six times a day," he tells me wistfully. "But at this age, after an open heart surgery at 80, I must be careful. For 80 years, I ate foods made of cream and ghee and butter and nothing happened. Now I hardly eat at all." And he proceeds to pull out some cookery books from by bookshelf and sits down to read them.

Raessa, who is feeding the children, gives me an update on her illustrious father whose Kheema-Lassan I am finding so outstandingly different, that I wish it could be marketed as a gourmet dish by the celebrated painter. She is saying, "He loves Italian food after Indian. That's because he's stayed with the famous film-maker Rosellini who was a great cook. Sundays, they would get together with friends and celebrate with a cook in. Baba loves pastas. He hates Chinese food. He thinks its too over-rated. He will only eat Chinese food when he is not well! But at Mayfair Garden in London, he will always visit the Chinese restaurant Kai. He does not eat Indian food abroad. He says its made by Bangladeshis! He hardly eats at home. He complains nobody knows how to cook! After his open heart surgery, he gave up red meat. Now he eats only fried chicken. He's not a great seafood eater. Shrimps and pomfret. Other fish don't agree with him. He doesn't drink. He's got a sweet tooth. Moong Dal Halwa, Shahi Tukra with Malai, that kind of thing. In his car, he always keep a box of Kalakhand or Ladoos. And he used to love British bread puddings in Irani restaurants. Now he says they call it Lagan nu Custard!"

I go to see what Husain is doing. And like all great artists that come home to roost, he has spread out my kitchen apron on a table and is working on it with a box of sketch pens. "This apron was looking too khali-khali," says the great painter, "So I thought I'd bring some jaan into it." And to my great delight, he does one of his impromptu works on the apron and hangs it back on its peg unconcernedly. Now I have a work of art in my kitchen too! I ask him about cooking. Does he think good chefs are also great artists. "Of course," replies Husain. "Chefs, khansamas, like great artists, when they take what they do to excellence, the aesthetics is always there." "Considering what a gourmet you are," I tell him, "why is it that you never painted food before?" And Husain looks non-plussed. "I don't know. But why to paint what you can devour? I mean, why bring out on canvas what you want to put inside you!"

And the upshot of Maqbool Fida Husain's cooking Kheema-Lassan and Parwali Roti at home for me that Sunday is that my six-year-old neice Zahra, who was a confirmed rice eater all her young life, has now started eating chapatis at home. But she keeps asking for Parwali Roti. And there she has her mother mystified.