Between the Lines follows Ram Kumar’s journey from his childhood in Shimla to his final years in his Delhi studio, looking at how a line could become a word, a figure, a landscape, and finally almost pure colour. The book moves through different moments in his life: the refugee colonies of Delhi after Partition, his years in Paris, his first encounter with landscape in Europe, the discovery of Benares, the vast emptiness of Ladakh, and the increasingly spare paintings of his later years. Along the way, it looks closely at the relationship between his writing and painting, between memory and image, and at the gradual disappearance of the human figure from his work. Written partly through the index cards I had made before filming him at the age of ninety-one, the book also carries something of a filmmaker’s way of looking at paintings, asking how lines move, how colours hold weight, how a frame creates distance, and how a painting might contain a story even after the figures have disappeared.