new delhi, Sept. 14 -- For nearly six years, one of Delhi's most significant public artworks lay hidden from view, carefully boxed away in climate-controlled storage as if it had faded from memory. Now, at last, the monumental mural by modernist painter and Padma Vibhushan awardee MF Husain has come home again. Painted in 1963, just a year after the original World Health Organisation (WHO) South-East Asia regional office was completed, Husain's massive mural - The History of Medicine - is no ordinary artwork. Spanning 60 feet in length and 10 feet in height, signed twice by the artist in English and Hindi, it was a bold fusion of public architecture and modern Indian art at a time when such collaborations were rare. Its journey, however, has been anything but straightforward. In 2019, the WHO building - designed by legendary CPWD architect Habib Rahman - was declared structurally unsafe and demolished. A wall painting of this scale had to be extricated intact - a feat hitherto never attempted in Asia. The task was unprecedented, and the risks immense. Unlike a canvas, Husain's mural was painted directly onto a plaster wall inside a conference room. To save it, a team of conservators from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) spent around six months cutting through brick and mortar, slicing the mural into six massive panels before transporting them to a climate-controlled storage facility. WHO itself acknowledged the scale of the feat. A 2019 regional committee document noted: "This was an ambitious and complicated project with the most modern technical procedures being implemented for the safe removal of the artwork, a feat hitherto never attempted anywhere in Asia." For four years, the mural lay in crates, awaiting the rise of the new WHO complex. That moment has now come. Reinstalled in the lobby of the organisation's middle tower -- instead of being tucked away in a conference room where few saw it up close -- the work will soon greet visitor as they step into the new headquarters at IP Estate. "The mural has been reinstalled in the reception area of the building," an NBCC spokesperson confirmed. "Final finishing work will be carried out once the building is dust-free." "The most effective and least harmful way to remove artworks was to move them en bloc while attached and this procedure is only permitted under the supervision of structural engineers and conservators. So, INTACH collaborated with diamond saw cutting experts to protect murals from damage. Prior to any dismantling work, five protective layers and a dummy wall were prepared to test the saw's efficacy," according to an INTACH newsletter, which detailed the process. Its return also resurrects memories of the building it once adorned. Conceived in 1962, the WHO office was among the most expensive public projects of its time. Its architect, Habib Rahman -- Padma Bhushan awardee, modernist pioneer, and the designer of many post-Independence landmarks -- saw art as inseparable from public architecture. In a little-known policy shift in 1956, then PM Jawaharlal Nehru mandated that 2% of the cost of public buildings be devoted to art. According to an unpublished interview of Rahman from the 1980s, shared by his son photographer Ram Rahman with HT, "CPWD set up the 'decoration committee' of which I was a member. The name of the committee is significant as it sums up the attitude of the engineer-overlords to the arts in general. My WHO building and the Indraprastha Bhawan benefited." Ram pointed out that Husain made three major public murals in Delhi in the early 1960s: "Hussain did two long mural paintings for the auditorium at WHO, and the exterior tile mural at Indraprastha Bhawan in 1963-65 and the CSIR building on Rafi Marg." "The one in the WHO building was an interior mural painted directly on the brick and plaster wall of the conference room. That is why its removal and preservation was such a technical challenge," Rahman said. "This is not a canvas that can be rolled up. Entire portions of the wall had to be extracted. That in itself shows the significance of the painting." For Ram, the building was also a milestone in India's architectural journey. "When my father passed away in 1995, architect Joseph Stein said the WHO building was his finest creation." The mural speaks not only of medicine but also of an era of ambition - when India's newly independent state attempted to embed art into everyday life. Husain, already recognised as a leading figure of modern Indian art, painted the mural on the walls of the conference hall in his unmistakable form. It depicted the history of medicine, from the traditional Ayurveda to modern medicine.It also shows Lord Hanuman bringing the Sanjeevini Booti from the Himalayas. Officials from NBCC, tasked with the campus redevelopment, said the new WHO towers are 99% complete and will be handed over by September 2025. "The MF Hussain mural has been reinstalled in the reception area of the building. At present, the murals are kept covered and the final finishing work of the mural shall be done after September when the building shall be dust free," said an NBCC spokesperson. And so, more than 60 years after Husain first stood on scaffolding to paint it, his brushstrokes once again reclaim their place in the public eye. For now, covered under protective sheets, they wait to be unveiled, ready to catch the gaze of health workers, diplomats, and visitors....