For a granny, she's a jet setter who's chewing up more air miles than most corporate honchos do in a year. "They hold art camps in such exotic places now," she explains her peripatetic life, "not some abandoned school building as was the practice earlier." And with husband Raja Menon, formerly of the Indian Navy, also a frequent traveller, Anjolie's on a roll.
In more ways than one. Her seniority and success as an artist has never been in doubt, but now that her canvases are being snapped up even before the oil's dried on them, Anjolie can afford her leisure. Not that money has ever been the mantra of her life.
"In the fifties, it used to help pay the children's school fees," she says self-deprecatingly, "but money itself could never seduce me. In fact, I'm so used to not having any, now that I do, I still find it difficult to spend more than Rs 2,000 or Rs 3,000 at a time."
But with paintings selling for several lakh apiece and being traded for many times that sum in the secondary market, Anjolie can claim to be in the big league of the masters, a clutch of whom rule the marquee in India. "I'm still in shock about my price," she says, "about the price people are willing to pay to buy my paintings."
It hasn't turned her prolific. If anything, it's turned her experimental, and it is this I'm hoping Anjolie will talk about, not some granny-talk as I arrive to collect her from her Nizammuddin East apartment.
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We had fixed up our appointment almost two weeks ago, venue undecided. Where would she like to eat? "What's the place everyone is talking about, some Israeli chef's restaurant?" she asks tentatively. I'm glad I'm up on Delhi's hippest diner, Oliva, run by Moshe Shek, with its Lebanese cuisine.
She's on the phone when I arrive to collect her up, dressed like a granny in a hand-woven saree, eyes bright with kohl, outsized stones glinting on earlobes and gnarled fingers. Just for a moment I have misgivings. Will she spend the afternoon tittering about her grandchildren?
As she gets into the car, I apologise for its lack of luxury. Anjolie laughs, "See that," she says, "for years that was our car. My husband used to drive it to work," pointing to a tarpaulin covered 1932 Austin.
Now we can't even get tyres for it. It wasn't till he retired that we could even afford a new car with all the gratuity benefits he was given. I've always liked my Zen," she confides, "but now the children want me to get something newer, flashier."
Conversation with Anjolie is uninhibited. Pricing, the new mantra, is something that she recognises as creating forces that are threatening the buoyancy of the market. "In the last 10 days," she is perturbed, "my attention has been drawn to two fakes purportedly painted by me.
It's obviously the same artist doing them, because he's making a mistake with the lips and mouth of the figures, and is doing details from books and catalogues instead of full paintings."
At Oliva, we grab a table next to a boisterous birthday party, all other tables occupied by well-dressed women. "This is obviously where the lunching ladies meet," says Anjolie looking around and adding, "Mostly I don't eat lunch." I groan.
Are we going to be on a starvation diet? But I haven't reckoned on Anjolie's spirit of joie de vivre yet. "You're going to write about the food as well, aren't you?" she asks. I nod. "Then let's try a little of everything," she says, and we get down to the serious business of ordering. She'll have a glass of iced lime and mint tea, I'll have water.
We decide on jalapeno hummus for starters, accompanied by a salad of asparagus, grilled zucchini and mushroom in parmesan sauce. Both prove to be excellent choices, and though she may aver otherwise, Anjolie proves to have a healthy diet for everything from food to conversation.
The main course was intended to be a rigorous discussion, but we decide to add grilled rawas for her, a pot roast of chicken and rice for me. While Shek is presumably in the kitchen with his potions and herbs, it's time to veer the discussion to the phase Anjolie now finds herself in as an artist.
"I've finished 10 years of experimentation," she says, "some of which have led to movements of art. Such as kitsch, which was a deliberate attempt on my part to incorporate, perhaps even lampoon, but also acknowledge the respect for the skills of calendar and film poster artists which has been the matrix for popular art in India."
From there she moved to painted objects, "the opposite of installation art," she explains, and later to experiment with computer/digital art and finally, with glass. "I was instrumental in bringing art down from its high pedestal. Most people approach it with a sense of awe.
I wanted to break that," she says somewhat smugly, breaking off bits of pita bread to scoop out the hummus which, for the record, was excellent. "I'm now going back to oils," she says. Because the experimentation wasn't remunerative, I point out, with people wanting her canvases, not her painted chairs?
"I was a karma-yogi as far as experimentation went, I never thought of the fruits of my labour." But surely money is its own award? "The whole point of fame," she corrects me, "is neither money nor recognition, it is the freedom to choose your own expression of creativity."
Today, that freedom is threatened too, because of the status of the art market. "Its commodification is very real now," she says, "and many artists are balking at that kind of surrender. I too feel pushed by the market."
Her escape is attending art camps, instigating animated discussions with the younger sorority, even encouraging "young women artists who need a little push to stay with it because they get easily discouraged". Did she, ever? "I moved thirty homes after our marriage, and it was difficult for me being in art deserts such as Vladivostok or Visakhapatnam or Gir."
Anjolie was lucky, however, to be part of a cerebral group of artists who could intellectualise their art and talk about it with a critical faculty. "We could look at each other's work and criticise it constructively. Today, there's a great show of bonhomie, but also a great deal of envy."
This, says Anjolie, despite the far greater chance they have to exposure in the West. She, on the other hand, may have studied in Paris, but learnt her real lesson when she went tramping through the streets of New York looking for a gallery to represent her.
"They're far less mainstream than we are," she recounts, "with galleries for Jews, for gays, for Africans, for the Mafia, but almost none for those who don't want labels. Compared to them," she grins, "we're still babes in the woods."
We've shared our main courses. Anjolie's fish has turned out to be an excellent choice. My hameen tastes like the leftovers in the fridge mixed together into porridge and heated in the microwave for Sunday dining. A cr