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For the book,Menon went through 1,000 slides and spent days touching up some of the older slides that capture her early style. She has also sourced some of her earlier works from collectors in Delhi for the exhibition. “I have a heightened awareness about where my works are and who my collectors are. This book documents the largest body of my work,” she says.

In a way,Menon has come full circle. After trying her hand at glass sculptures with an Italian called Antonio Da Ross,painting kitschy Bollywood poster art and rendering the famous chairs that placed the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf eternally opposite each other,her latest works revisit oil on masonite. They also echo early themes like nude woman with her pet cat,mendicants and the Brahmins. “I feel most comfortable with this medium and I think that people across the board,from the lay person to the critic,appreciated my works from that period,” says Menon,whose doe-eyed women have been her signature style.

“Coffee-table books are usually unaffordable and not reader friendly,which is why I want to bring out a smaller version and have the text translated into Malayalam and Hindi because a huge audience gets neglected when you publish only in English,” says Menon. The show also has serigraphs. Menon says she is not in favour of overpricing her art: “Of course the auction houses make a mockery of me trying to regulate pricing by selling works for twice its market worth. The truth is that these are manipulated prices and galleries are still finding it tough to sell art on an everyday basis. A boom is always followed by a bust,which is why I am happier to keep things real.”

Her next work is,surprisingly,a book on food and recipes that will reflect what this American-Punjabi married to a Malayali loves to eat—from Syrian Christian curries to Goan sanna idlis.