Answer: David De Souza.

Of course, the temperamental nandi bail preferred to be shot De Souza’s garage, explains the Bombay based 55-year-old.

Souza has had some of the most “amazing” experiences every time he opens the doors of his second floor apartment of an otherwise elite Churchgate neighbourhood to the faces that make up the street outside. Once inside his studio apartment, he allows dabbawallahs,the enterprising boys selling wares at traffic signals, coolies, face readers, an oil vendor, a shoe-shine boy and hundreds of similar faces that one sees in the city, to “become themselves in front of the camera”. He changes nothing about them, allowing them everything that keeps their identity intact, and then captures the person inside them before they once again lose themselves in the bustle of the street.

“It’s one thing to click pictures on the street, in their environment. I bring them here, inside my home, put on the lights, sterilise the background, with zero distractions and try to capture the subject in their best elements, their perfect moods,” says Souza.

It is this interest in human characteristics that he has been experimenting with since 2000, which has already been featured in a world travel series in a Discovery Channel-produced Lonely Planet documentary called Six Degrees, Mumbai.A series about comprehending the sense of the city, the travel and lifestyle channel chose Souza for this body of work.

Still scouting for a publishing house that can shape his work-with poems and verses by his wife Charmaine accompanying each of the faces-into a book, Souza says he continues to get surprising reactions from people he invites home to pose. “One thing is for sure, everyone loves it in front of the camera,” he agrees, even as he waits to hear from the Bhau Daji Lad museum where his work of seven years could be a part of the first exhibition they plan to have, now that the museum has had an official launch.

Souza finished his masters in bio-chemistry in 1976-”in those days you took science if you are a boy, arts if you are a girl, and commerce if you are a Gujarati”-and bargained with an old lady for nine months before buying his Minolta SRT101 for Rs 2,000. On the last day of the year, as the world celebrated, he left home for Nashik to work on issues of water and an agrarian crisis the tribals were facing, with a non-governmental organisation. Among other things, he “learnt for the first time from life”, fell in love with a tribal villager and made her the “most-photographed woman in the village”, and exhausted much black-and white-film capturing the village landscape. As the hobby evolved, he later became a lecturer at the King Edwards Memorial Hospital and moved later to the Middle East to become a petroleum chemist. A professor of art now, Souza spends several hours teaching photography to students across six colleges, even as he spends most of his operative hours doing commercial photography.

But it is a later discovery that is closest to his heart: “Women, I just love them.”

Little wonder then, that his work on the modern interpretation of mythological characters like Lord Varun, Lord Yama and Lord Vishnu has women portraying them. There is even one woman, looking perfectly comfortable in a chair used for giving electric shocks, with a crow for company, depicting Satan. “I work for myself. So I have never been able to answer questions on where the work will be exhibited. In India, the climate for such expression is not good. And abroad, where I think it will reach some day, people will not understand the essence of the mythological characters these women represent,” Souza says.

With only one mythogical character left, the work should be complete soon. “I am yet to finish Mahishasuramardhini. She will be photographed under water, as my model is a swimmer.”

His affection for women, and his complete understanding of their world, can perhaps be best judged through the nude photography he is now accomplished in. Of the 25 women who have been photographed nude, “21 approached me, instead of the other way around”. Other things in his life have a similar history. “My best work is when destiny has searched me, instead of the other way around.”