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This is the earliest painting in the Khamsah manuscript (see RCIN 1005032), dating to 1540. The painting depicts the passage in Navai’s text describing an imaginary meeting in a bathhouse between Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, the twelfth-century Muslim theologian and philosopher from Herat, and his contemporary, Shah Muhammad of Khwarazm. Shah Muhammad asks al-Razi to describe the Day of Judgement. He replies that on that day too, rich and poor will be alike in their nakedness.

In the top and right panels, the building is depicted from its exterior: the geometric forms of the dome and doorway silhouetted against a gold sky. A date of 947 AH (AD 1540–1) written at the very end of the rooftop epigraphic inscription suggests that these areas of the painting belong to a sixteenth-century phase in the manuscript’s history. The upper half of the interior view also dates to this period: the dome’s pendentives are ornamented with a typically Bukharan pair of angels sharing a cup of wine. In the early seventeenth century the Mughal artist Govardhan scraped off (probably damaged) areas of paint in the foreground and repainted the figures with new ones painted in a Mughal style.

The incidental details of this scene refer the bathhouse as a space of homosexual desire. The men are linked by a network of intense gazes and tender hand gestures and the door-keeper standing in the antechamber turns his head the other way.