As cars honk and motorcycles streak by, Kailash Janger stands in the middle of the road planning his next temporary masterpiece.

Kailash traditionally spends his days engaged in the permanent pursuit of tagging up the walls of palaces and 5-star hotels with traditional Rajasthani murals. He usually works in his studio just off of City Palace Road, painting miniatures and preparing murals with his 25-year-old son. But tonight he can be found kneeling in the street in the middle of a crowd of onlookers, painting with dust.

It’s late September and the third night of the Durga Puja, a celebration honoring the Hindu goddess of power. Soon the streets will be filled with revelers dancing in circles banging sticks. But now it’s just Kailash, a few cows and playing children, as men set up the barriers for the night’s festivities.

Kailash has been doing nightly street murals for the Durga Puja since the early nineties and has since moved up to organizing Udaipur’s largest Puja party. Every night, he says, 1000 people gather for the 10-day festival on City Palace Road near Jagdish Temple. He designed the silver streamers that add a scenic ceiling to the street and helped collect donations from local families and businesses for the celebration.

Kailash changes Durga street mural each evening and has chosen a particularly political message for tonight’s iteration, that of abortion. So, tonight he’s using the same type of powder used in the Holi Celebration to take his message to the street.

It takes him nearly an hour to create the mural of the hand of a god brings children to parents who decided with the help of a mediator to abort the fetus. Usually he uses permanent paints naturally hued with herbs and ground rocks. Tonight however, he starts with a faint chalk outline and uses powder for colors. After roughing out his design with the same powder that's normally used to play Holi, he uses black chalk for detail.

As he finishes and the children run off to play before the festival begin, Kailash signs his work and prepares to join the night’s festivities.