Florine Asch's exquisite watercolours on the city of grime and grit have romanticised Mumbai to a highly aspirational level, roadside ear cleaners, parrot sellers, dabbawallahs, et al! Hailing from Alsace in eastern France, the land of Pinot Blanc, sauerkraut and foie gras, Asch's two earlier visits to Mumbai presented her with an overwhelming amount of material to take back home to Paris and fashion into a series of paintings that Louis Vuitton's Isabelle Hamelin condensed into Mumbai, A Passage to India, the ninth destination in the international brand's collection of travel notebooks.

Exuding her own personal brand of warmth and glamour to the peek preview luncheon at Taj Mahal Palace & Tower's Wasabi restaurant, was Kahini Arte-Merchant, affable host for Verve and herself a painter of repute whose watercolours were most recently exhibited at the Cymroza Art Gallery as part of their 35th anniversary celebrations.

Over generous rounds of bubbly and platters of sushi, conversations ranged from Jaideep Mehrotra's Egyptian sojourn (of which wife Seema has made meticulous notes) and 'scrap metal sculptor' Arzan Khambatta's latest show, Emerge, to Sudarshan Shetty's much debated installations, entitled Love, especially the skeletal dinosaurs. While Brinda Miller chatted with Kahini and Florine's banker husband, Francois Millet the elfin Payal Khandwala, alumni of the Parsons School of Design, NY, shared her upcoming wedding plans with another new bride-to-be, Falguni Sheth, Verve's creative director.

Other artists at the tables included painter duos, Prajakta and Justin Ponmany, Vidya Kamat and Baiju Parthan, Sunil Padwal and the still boyish Julius Macwan, attired in his inimitable wraparound skirt. While the artists' spouses caught up with each other at one end of the room, another table presided over by Louis Vuitton India advisor, Tikka Shatrujit Singh, remained in laughter mode all through the courses of Miso soup, seaweed salad and rock shrimp tempura, thanks to the irreverent banter and naughty jokes, courtesy Jaideep and Arzan.

The carefully planned menu was so appreciated by the guests, that at one point, Florine rose from her seat, mid bite, to congratulate the shy, Japanese chef on his innovatively flavoured salmon carpaccio. When the crème brulee arrived, Karen Wilson Kumar, Louis Vuitton Retail Manager, India, immediately declared it to be distinctly oriental, in keeping with the spirit of the restaurant - uniquely piquant with a dash of drama. Somewhat also like the works of all our artists, whose exhibitions Florine vowed to see, curious, no doubt, to also match the canvases to the faces she had just encountered!