The M F Husain Museum in Qatar has opened at a time when we need it most

I enter through a golden, leaf-shaped door, just theatrical enough to summon a faint echo of The Arabian Nights. The first room is a wash of moving images, quotes and glimpses of Husain. A prologue in flicker form. Then comes a 360-degree immersive room where blue camels and palm trees bloom and shift beneath your feet. Stairs coil upward to the first floor, where the gallery traces the polymath that Husain was, as well as his years in India: the 1950s doll paintings, billboard-style canvases, the Do or Die series and the faceless female figures who mirrored his search for his mother. The Film Tower stands dark and vertical, clips of movies playing inside it like ghosts rising from a well.

Nearby sits the Dabs and Wounds series, inkblots, pain and raw nerves made visible. Glass cases hold Husain’s passport, his tools, a beautiful green coat. Growing up in Bangalore, a city the artist called home in the ’90s, I saw his works casually hung in people’s drawing rooms. As a teenager, I frequented Husain Sankalana, his home-turned-museum-turned-restaurant, just to breathe the same air, convinced that genius might seep into me by osmosis. In Doha, that old feeling returns as I move through his work.