Sameer Bhide
1
The train screeched to a halt with a metallic groan, and the smell of coal, iron, and a hundred kinds of human fatigue hung heavy in the air. Bimal stepped down onto the platform of Victoria Terminus with a battered canvas bag, a portfolio case under one arm, and an envelope stitched into the lining of his shirt containing twenty-six rupees. Bombay. The city of cinema, sweat, and stories. The year was 1956, and Bimal was twenty-four years old.
He stood for a moment, absorbing the chaos around him. Vendors shouting about chai and vada pav. Porters hustling for fares. Families reunited, lovers separating. It all moved too fast and yet never seemed to go anywhere. Bimal had read about Bombay in magazines and film journals in Calcutta. He’d imagined it in black and white, like the movies. But the real city was all color—grime and neon, sunshine and shadow.
He took a deep breath. His father had called him mad for leaving a modest but steady sign-painting job in Behala. “Cinema posters? You think that’s art?” he’d shouted. Bimal didn’t argue. He simply left a note.
Now, standing under the Gothic arches of the station, Bimal felt both small and unsinkable. He began walking with no idea where he would sleep that night.
By late afternoon, the light in Bombay took on a burnished gold quality. Bimal had walked for hours, past Crawford Market, through narrow lanes where Urdu film titles jostled for space with political slogans. He finally reached Grant Road, where an old painter from his neighborhood had once told him the real poster studios lived.
Grant Road was a city within the city. Signboard shops, print houses, and studios spilled onto the streets like open-air galleries. Bimal watched an old man painting a larger-than-life image of Nargis onto canvas, his fingers sure and swift. He stopped, mesmerized.
“First time in Bombay?” someone asked beside him. It was a short, bespectacled man with paint on his kurta.
“Yes. Just arrived this morning. I’m looking for work. Painting posters.”
The man smirked. “You and half the country. Come. I’ll take you to Amol-da. If he doesn’t throw you out, you might get lucky.”
Bimal followed. His heart pounded.
Amol-da’s studio was up a narrow staircase that smelled of turpentine and old dreams. The walls were lined with rolled-up canvases, posters in mid-process, and half-empty tea cups. The man himself sat cross-legged on a platform, shading in the cheekbone of a painted Raj Kapoor.
“Who’s this?” Amol-da asked without looking up.
“New boy. Wants to paint.”
“Everyone wants to paint. Can you draw feet?”
“Feet?”
“Yes. Most new boys can’t. They make everyone float. Draw me a foot.”
Bimal was handed a charcoal pencil and a scrap of paper. He knelt, glancing at Amol-da’s own feet. They were bare, cracked, real. He drew.
Minutes passed. The studio was silent except for the occasional honk from the street below.
Amol-da finally looked. “Not bad. Ever done backdrops?”
“No, sir. Just signboards. But I’ve done life studies. In charcoal and watercolour.”
“Hmm. Alright. You can stay. No salary till you prove yourself. You’ll mix paint, clean brushes, and watch. Understood?”
Bimal nodded, eyes burning. This was more than he had dared hope.
The studio became his home. At night, he curled up in a corner between stacked canvases. Amol-da lent him a rough blanket and a tin plate. There were four other assistants, each with their own ambitions, alliances, and jealousies. Bimal kept quiet and worked hard.
He learned fast. How to mix just the right shade of skin tone that would glow under a theatre bulb. How to stretch canvas taut over wooden frames. How to transfer a 6-inch sketch into a 60-foot banner. There was no room for error in scale. No erasers. No second chances.
Days blurred into each other. He painted the same eyes over and over—wide, tragic eyes of heroines who never blinked, heroes with angry brows. One day, Amol-da grunted approval at his lettering. That night Bimal treated himself to a 4-anna tea from a stall run by a boy named Shafi.
“You’re with Amol-da’s gang?” Shafi asked.
“Yes. Just joined.”
“Good man. Honest. But don’t cross him. He once threw a paintbrush at a producer’s face.”
Bimal laughed. It felt good.
One afternoon, a man in a white safari suit walked into the studio with a briefcase full of black-and-white photos.
“New film. Madhumati. Bimal Roy’s direction. I want the posters by next Friday. Big launch.”
The photos were of a young woman in a saree, half-smiling. There was fog in the background. A forest.
Amol-da handed them to Bimal. “Start with a rough sketch. Try something dreamy. Not just faces. Atmosphere.”
Bimal worked all night. He added elements not in the photo—a twisted tree, shadows that hinted at ghosts. When Amol-da saw it, he didn’t say anything. He just nodded once.
It was the first time Bimal’s hand had been trusted to create the concept itself.
That week, as he painted, a girl posed for figure references in the corner. She had sharp cheekbones and wore a green salwar-kameez. Her name was Maya.
“Why do all your heroes look so sad?” she asked him one evening.
“Because even love stories end in loss.”
She laughed, a short, musical sound. “You’re a poet with a brush, Bimal-da.”
He smiled, not used to being seen.
Every day, she returned. Sometimes she posed. Sometimes she just watched. Her presence was like a quiet light.
On a Sunday, Bimal and Maya walked down Marine Drive. The city shimmered. He told her about Behala, about the river, about a younger brother who still wrote letters in Bengali.
She listened, never interrupting.
Before leaving, she handed him a folded paper. Inside was a small charcoal sketch of him, painting.
“In case you forget what you look like while making everyone else famous,” she said.
Bimal kept it in his pocket for years.
That night, lying under the warm buzz of a single yellow bulb, Bimal stared at the beams above him and thought—not of fame, or money, or even home—but of how a brush, when guided by something real, could become more than tool. It could become truth.
And in that moment, Bombay didn’t feel like a stranger.
It felt like a canvas.
2
Bimal was beginning to realize that Bombay never truly slept—it only paused. At Amol-da’s studio, the nights echoed with snores, distant horns, and the restless twitching of dreams deferred. Mornings were brisk and unceremonious. Water from a shared bucket, tea from a shared stall, and work that never seemed to end.
He’d risen early that Monday, careful not to step on the feet of other assistants. Amol-da was already sketching outlines for a new film starring N.T. Rama Rao. The film’s title was smudged on a scrap of paper. Bimal noted the dramatic angle of the sword and the oddly long mustache of the hero.
“Put strength in the stance,” Amol-da instructed, pointing. “Make the poster fight even before the actor does.”
Bimal smiled. That was Amol-da’s genius—every pose, every muscle, every shadow was dramatized to near-myth. It wasn’t just advertisement. It was reverence.
During lunch, the team sat on the studio floor with paper packets of rice and aloo bhaji. They ate with fingers stained with paint. Someone played an old Hindi song on a transistor. Maya wasn’t there today.
“She has another gig. A dancing scene somewhere,” said Chandan, another assistant, with a smirk. “Your muse has other admirers.”
Bimal didn’t respond. He knew Maya was not his to claim.
After lunch, Amol-da motioned to Bimal.
“You’re going with me today. A meeting at Liberty Theatre. Some new clients.”
They boarded a BEST bus, Amol-da clutching a rolled canvas, Bimal carrying his own sketchbook. The city passed by in flickers—textile workers outside a mill gate, children chasing a punctured football, a man arguing with his reflection in a storefront glass.
Liberty Theatre stood grandly on Marine Lines, art-deco columns painted a pale cream, with turquoise windows and a sense of mid-century hope. Inside, the cool air smelled of damp velvet and old stories.
The producer they met was named Mr. Lulla, a soft-spoken man with a penchant for chewing clove. He explained the next project—a romantic musical with a rural setting and tragic undertone.
“Give me something timeless,” he said. “Something that will haunt.”
Amol-da turned to Bimal. “You heard the man.”
That night, Bimal didn’t sleep. He sketched by the light of a half-burnt candle. Faces, forests, rain, eyes—he didn’t know what would be used. But he knew what needed to be said.
Three days later, Bimal’s concept was chosen over the senior assistant’s. There were murmurs of jealousy, even silent glares, but no open confrontations. Bimal was too quiet to challenge.
That evening, as he climbed to the rooftop of the studio, Maya was already there.
“Your star is rising,” she said, without turning.
He shrugged. “Not yet.”
They sat in silence. Below, the streets glittered like wet ink.
“I used to think Bombay was cruel,” she said. “But now I think it just doesn’t care. That can be worse.”
Bimal nodded.
“Do you ever miss home?” she asked.
“Only the silence. And the trees.”
She turned to him then. “Paint them. Even here. Paint your silence. Paint your trees. That’s the only way to stay alive.”
Bimal didn’t know it yet, but those words would follow him across every canvas he’d ever touch.
3
By late October, Bombay’s brief flirtation with monsoon was over, and a dry warmth settled over the city like a film over old celluloid. The studio’s rhythm had grown faster. New films. New deadlines. New faces. Bimal painted like a man possessed.
On some days, his hands ached so badly he could barely hold a brush. Yet he never stopped. When Maya asked why he pushed so hard, he simply replied, “Because someday, this won’t be enough.”
One afternoon, while adding final strokes to a hand-painted hoarding of Madhumati, Amol-da called out, “Boy, you’re coming to Churchgate with me. Meeting at Filmistan Studios.”
It wasn’t just a meeting. It was an event.
Filmistan’s studio gates loomed tall and white, guarded like a fortress. Inside, everything smelled of heat and ambition. They passed carpenters sawing props, choreographers shouting at junior dancers, and a faint echo of laughter from a set wrapped in smoke for a dream sequence.
They were ushered into a side office. The man waiting there wore a cream-colored kurta, gold-rimmed spectacles, and the unmistakable air of someone used to being listened to.
“Mr. Kaul,” Amol-da said with an incline of his head. “You know me. This is my assistant, Bimal.”
Kaul nodded, then laid out a single photograph. A face. No background. No setting. Just the profile of a young woman. Big eyes. Nervous smile.
“She’s a new find,” Kaul said. “Name’s Zeenat. I want her to become unforgettable before the film even releases. We start with the posters. No gimmicks. No montage. Just her.”
Bimal took the photo in silence. The face wasn’t classically beautiful. But it was real. Arresting. Vulnerable in a way that felt dangerous.
“Make her a goddess,” Kaul added. “But not one we can’t touch.”
That night, Bimal stared at the photograph under the studio’s flickering tube light. He tried to imagine the woman behind the image. Did she laugh easily? Did she rehearse smiles in the mirror? Was she aware of how much weight that one picture now carried?
He began sketching. Not with a full pose or elaborate setting. Just shadows across her cheek. The shape of her mouth when unsmiling. Her uncertainty—amplified.
When Amol-da saw the sketch next morning, he said nothing for a long time. Then: “You’ve found your eye.”
It was the closest he had come to giving praise.
Over the next few days, Bimal poured himself into the poster. It wasn’t loud or colorful. It didn’t rely on spectacle. Instead, it was a study in restraint—her face, half-lit; the title in gentle cursive; the background a storm-gray wash.
When Kaul returned to review it, he took a long breath.
“She looks like she’s about to tell me a secret,” he said. “Good. Very good.”
That poster would later be printed on hoardings across Bombay. And Zeenat—previously unknown—was suddenly spoken of in the same breath as Nutan and Meena Kumari.
But Bimal didn’t hear those conversations. He was too tired. The moment the approval came, he stepped outside the studio and vomited behind a wooden crate. His body, too, had its limits.
Later that week, Maya returned after a long absence. She looked worn. Her eyes rimmed in kohl, but dull.
“Rehearsals,” she said when he asked. “They don’t let you eat. They barely let you breathe.”
She stayed quiet for long stretches. When she spoke, it was mostly to herself.
“I sometimes think I’m becoming a prop,” she said one evening. “Useful only when someone else paints me, lights me, places me just right.”
“You’re not,” Bimal said.
“I am,” she replied. “And sometimes, I don’t even mind.”
The silence that followed felt heavy, too full to break. They just sat there, sharing the same silence but different lonelinesses.
One day, Bimal noticed a man loitering around the studio. Thin, with an uneven moustache, and too quick to smile. At first, he thought nothing of it. But then the man began asking for Maya.
“She’s not here,” Bimal said.
“Tell her Rajan came by.”
Maya’s face hardened when Bimal told her.
“He’s a hanger-on. Thinks being near the industry makes him important. Took some photos of me once. Now behaves like he owns me.”
“Want me to talk to him?”
“No,” she said. “Bombay’s full of Rajans. You learn to dodge them.”
With the Zeenat poster a success, Amol-da began giving Bimal more responsibility. He now managed younger assistants. He even led client meetings when Amol-da was unwell.
But with that success came envy. Chandan, once friendly, now rarely spoke. One evening, Bimal found one of his own pencil roughs in the garbage pile, torn.
He said nothing. But he did not forget.
Around this time, a telegram arrived. It was from Behala. Short. Sparse.
“Ma ill. Come soon if possible.”
Bimal read it twice. Then a third time.
He hadn’t been home in over a year.
He showed the telegram to Amol-da.
“Go,” the old man said simply. “We’ll manage. But don’t stay too long. Bombay forgets people quickly.”
At Howrah station, the city felt smaller than he remembered. Calcutta was slower, dustier. Behala had not changed much. Except now, he saw its stillness as suffocation.
His mother was pale but lucid.
“You look thinner,” she said. “But there’s something new in your eyes. Like you’ve seen too many things too fast.”
He stayed five days. On the last evening, he showed her some black-and-white photos of his posters.
She pointed to the Zeenat one. “This one. There’s sadness in her. Like she knows her story ends badly.”
He smiled. “You always read people too well.”
She touched his hand. “Make sure you don’t forget your own story.”
Returning to Bombay, he felt like he was waking from a dream within a dream. The studio buzzed. New projects were already on the walls. Zeenat’s second film. A Bengali art film needing an avant-garde look. A noir drama from a new director named Guru Dutt.
As he unpacked his things, he found the sketch Maya had once given him. He’d nearly forgotten it.
The sketch felt different now. Not because she had changed. But because he had. He was no longer just painting faces.
He was chasing ghosts.
4
It began with a knock.
Not a loud one. Not urgent. But deliberate—three soft taps on the studio door one mid-morning when the city outside was already sweating.
Bimal looked up from his drafting table. Amol-da was away, and the other boys had gone out for chai. When he opened the door, Zeenat was standing there.
In person, she looked even less like her photograph. Her face was angular, her skin dusky, her hair undone beneath a white dupatta. She looked nervous.
“I was told you made the poster,” she said.
“I did.”
She looked around the studio—at the curled posters, the scattered paint cans, the wooden stools with cracked legs.
“I thought it would be… fancier.”
Bimal grinned. “That’s Bombay for you. The illusion is grand. The backstage, not so much.”
She stepped in. Looked at the large canvas Bimal was working on for an upcoming action film. Then turned back to him.
“Why did you paint me like that?”
He paused. “Like what?”
“Like I was about to break.”
Bimal took a moment. Then said, “Because everyone else wanted you to be perfect. I thought you looked human.”
She smiled for the first time.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m tired of pretending otherwise.”
Over the next few weeks, Zeenat returned several times. Not as a muse, not for more posters. Just to talk.
She would sit by the window ledge, feet tucked up, while Bimal worked.
She spoke of her childhood in Nagpur. Of her strict mother and indulgent uncle. Of her running away from home with a local theatre troupe. Of how Mr. Kaul spotted her during a minor part in a regional play.
“They say I’m lucky,” she said. “But they don’t know the nights I slept in train stations.”
He told her about Behala. About his mother. About sketching faces on the back of newspaper wrappers and selling them to schoolboys.
“You don’t talk like other painters,” she said once.
“That’s because I’m not one,” he replied. “Not yet.”
Their friendship became a rumor.
Studio boys started whispering. Chandan muttered insults. One of the old technicians referred to her as “your starlet” with a smirk.
But Bimal didn’t care. Because something about Zeenat made him sharper, steadier.
It wasn’t romance. Not quite.
It was an understanding. Like they had both been shaped by a city that didn’t wait for anyone. And in each other, they had found a pause.
One evening, Zeenat arrived shaken.
“There’s a man,” she said. “He followed me after rehearsal. Said he knows where I live.”
Bimal’s jaw clenched. “Did you tell Kaul?”
“I can’t. He’ll think I’m careless.”
Bimal didn’t hesitate. He walked with her to her building that night. Waited outside until she locked her door. Then sat on the stone steps till dawn.
In the morning, she opened the window and whispered, “Thank you.”
He didn’t reply. He just walked away.
Maya, meanwhile, had noticed the change.
“You’re quieter,” she said. “Less haunted.”
“She talks to me,” Bimal said simply.
“And I don’t?”
He looked at Maya for a long time.
“You do,” he said. “But sometimes, your silence is louder than words.”
Maya lit a cigarette. Then said, “She won’t stay.”
“I know.”
“She’ll leave. When she becomes someone bigger than this city.”
“I know.”
“And still?”
He didn’t reply.
That week, a major assignment arrived. A collaborative poster for Pyaasa—Guru Dutt’s upcoming film. It was to be haunting. Poetic. Tragic.
Bimal was assigned the background and color design. But when he looked at the early sketches of the heroine’s face, he was disappointed.
“She’s too perfect,” he told Amol-da. “Too symmetrical. Dutt-saab’s story isn’t about beauty. It’s about despair.”
Amol-da nodded slowly. “So what do you suggest?”
“Let me try something different.”
He painted her with eyes that looked away from the viewer. A mouth that trembled slightly. A face that didn’t want to be adored, just seen.
When Guru Dutt saw it, he said only one word: “Yes.”
It was Bimal’s first true credit on a national campaign.
The night the poster was finalized, Zeenat came by with a bottle of warm soda and two paavs wrapped in old paper.
They sat in the courtyard behind the studio, under a broken streetlamp.
“Do you ever wish you’d chosen a different life?” she asked.
“Every day,” he said. “And then I come here, and I remember why I didn’t.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. Just for a second.
“I might be leaving,” she said.
His chest tightened.
“Where?”
“Calcutta. A new director. Wants me for a political drama. He says he’ll make me into something real.”
Bimal nodded. Swallowed hard.
“When?”
“Two weeks.”
They said nothing after that. Just let the Bombay silence hum around them like a faraway radio.
When she left, she didn’t say goodbye.
There was just a folded note under the paintbrush tray.
“Thank you for painting me as I was—not as the world wanted me to be.”
She signed it with just a Z.
Bimal read it twice. Then placed it inside the sketch Maya had once given him. Two faces. Two ghosts.
The next morning, he picked up a new brush. A new canvas.
The city outside didn’t notice.
But something had changed.
Inside him.
5
The winter of 1956 in Bombay arrived like a whisper, not a declaration. Cool mornings. Gentle winds sweeping down Marine Drive. The city seemed to exhale, if only for a moment. But inside the studio, things were heating up.
A new film, Raakh Aur Rang, had been greenlit by a rising producer with money from Delhi and dreams of international festivals. He wanted posters that “spoke the language of Paris but smelled like Bombay.”
Amol-da snorted. “He wants it all, so he’ll get nothing.”
But Bimal saw a challenge. For the first time, he was asked to lead an entire visual campaign—not just one poster, but everything: lobby cards, teaser banners, magazine inserts.
He took the assignment silently. But that night, he barely slept.
In his dreams, he saw Zeenat again—this time, not in person, but as paint. Smudged lines. A mouth that couldn’t speak. Eyes blurred into the skyline.
When he woke up, he reached for charcoal.
He started sketching a city: one that looked like Bombay but was always in the shadows. Wet pavements. Broken cinema seats. A girl running barefoot through a crowd that didn’t turn.
He worked for five straight hours.
When Amol-da saw the concept, he sat down slowly. “You’ve stopped copying the city,” he said. “Now you’re interpreting it.”
The shoot for Raakh Aur Rang happened in bits and fragments. Bimal visited the sets often—taking stills, talking to the DOP, watching how the camera moved.
The film was moody, disjointed, full of silent stares and foggy streets.
The lead actor, Ashfaq Agha, was a theatre veteran with a towering presence. He walked like a shadow and spoke like thunder rolling over a lake. But off camera, he was gentle.
One evening, he found Bimal alone on set and said, “Your posters feel like monologues.”
“I take that as a compliment,” Bimal replied.
“It is. Most people make posters that scream. Yours listen.”
Meanwhile, Maya had landed a small part in a Bengali social drama, shooting near Dadar. She came home late every night, her feet blistered, her mood brittle.
“They don’t let you breathe between scenes,” she said. “Every line is loaded. Every silence doubted.”
Bimal offered her tea, quiet understanding, and sometimes just presence. That winter, they became more like siblings—bound not by blood, but by the same bruised hope.
Once, she asked, “If this all ends tomorrow, what will you remember?”
He replied, “The smell of turpentine and dreams.”
Then, one afternoon, while waiting for a courier at the studio, he saw her again.
Zeenat.
Not in person.
On a magazine cover.
Draped in silk. A bold smile. Beside the headline: “Zeenat Khan: India’s Next Tragedy Queen?”
He traced the line of her jaw on the glossy page. It was the same face he had painted, but not the same woman.
He flipped the magazine. Found a quote:
“Bombay taught me to be seen. Calcutta taught me to be heard.”
He folded the magazine carefully and placed it under the drawer. For the rest of the day, his brush felt heavier.
The premiere of Raakh Aur Rang was held at Regal Cinema. Red carpet. Flashbulbs. Sitar music echoing through the foyer.
Bimal didn’t attend. He stood across the street with Maya, watching the limousines arrive.
“You should be in there,” she said.
“I am,” he said. “On every wall.”
She smiled. “Poetic bastard.”
When the lights inside dimmed and the crowd funneled in, they walked to Chowpatty and ate kulfi in silence.
The next morning, the first reviews came in. They were mixed for the film. But not for the posters.
“Haunting visual campaign,” one critic wrote. “More emotion in a painted face than the entire second act.”
Another: “Bimal Nandi, a name to remember.”
For the first time, his name was printed. In ink. In public.
He showed the clipping to Amol-da.
The old man nodded. Then said, “Good. Now burn it.”
“Why?”
“Because the moment you believe the praise, you stop growing.”
Bimal didn’t burn it. But he folded it into his diary and said nothing.
In January, a young boy from Lucknow named Arif joined the studio. Eager. Quick with lines. Terrible with perspective.
Bimal took him under his wing.
Not because he needed help.
But because he remembered being seventeen, invisible, and full of fire.
He taught Arif how to shade faces. How to use shadow not as filler but as emotion. How Bombay light was different from Delhi light, even on the same canvas.
Arif listened like a sponge. And slowly, Bimal saw the city again through someone else’s eyes.
One evening, while closing the studio shutters, Bimal found a photograph wedged between two boards.
It was Zeenat. From months ago. In costume. Backstage. Her eyes half-closed.
On the back, in pencil, someone had written: “For Bimal. So you never forget the version of me you invented.”
He stared at it for a long time. Then placed it between the pages of his sketchbook.
He didn’t show it to anyone.
Some things weren’t meant to be shared.
6
The letter arrived on a Wednesday, folded neatly into an envelope the color of faded turmeric. It bore no return address, only a stamped emblem Bimal had never seen before—two interlocked swans flying in opposite directions.
He opened it with a palette knife.
Inside was a single sheet of thick, creamy paper with typewritten lines:
Mr. Nandi,
I’ve followed your work for a while now. I believe you may be suited for something… larger.
Meet me Friday, 6 PM. Elphinstone Road Station. East exit. Come alone.
No signature.
He stared at it for a long time. Then tucked it into his satchel and got back to painting a poster for a B-grade horror film involving snakes, saints, and a very implausible love triangle.
When Friday came, Bimal stood outside the station at six sharp, his satchel on his back, paint stains on his sleeves.
At first, he thought no one had come. Then he noticed a tall man in a white kurta leaning against the fence, watching him.
He approached slowly.
“You sent the letter?”
The man smiled. “I did. Call me Kapadia.”
He looked nothing like a producer or an artist. More like a bureaucrat with too much time and too few illusions.
Kapadia walked as he talked. “There’s a job. A new kind of cinema. A collaboration of visionaries. We’re building a studio—off-grid, outside the usual racket. We want it to feel like Bengal renaissance meets Italian neorealism.”
Bimal blinked. “And what do you want from me?”
“Murals. Promotional art. Something beyond posters. Something that will live in the lobby and the hearts of people.”
“Where?”
“A warehouse in Mahim. Come tomorrow. You’ll see.”
He handed Bimal a torn tram ticket with an address scribbled in fountain pen.
Then walked away.
The next morning, Bimal stood before an old textile warehouse. Its gates were rusted. Inside, a group of people were gathered—actors, musicians, a puppeteer from Baroda, a Frenchwoman with a camera.
At the center stood Kapadia.
He gestured to the bare walls. “Paint what the future looks like to you.”
No brief. No deadline.
Just space.
Bimal stared at the raw brick. For the first time in months, he felt fear and excitement braid together.
He began with charcoal. Then added texture with dried leaves. Then pigments, borrowed from the Frenchwoman’s strange satchel.
He painted not people, but motion. Smoke curling like thought. Wires connecting hearts. A projector blooming like a lotus.
It wasn’t pretty.
But it was alive.
Back at the regular studio, Maya noticed his new restlessness.
“You look like you’re chasing ghosts,” she said.
“Maybe I am.”
She offered him a postcard. Zeenat on a Calcutta stage, in a shawl, head tilted back.
“She’s coming back,” Maya said.
Bimal didn’t ask how she knew.
He simply stared at the image.
Meanwhile, Arif was gaining confidence.
He completed his first solo commission—a film called Naachni, about a courtesan who defies a king. The poster was garish, unbalanced, and brilliant.
Bimal offered him one word: “Better.”
Arif beamed for a week.
One evening, Kapadia brought someone new to the Mahim studio.
An American photographer. Grey-haired. Tired eyes.
He walked past Bimal’s mural, paused, and said, “Reminds me of Gorky. Before the breakdown.”
Bimal had never heard the name. But the tone made him curious.
That night, he visited the library near Grant Road and spent three hours looking up modernist painters.
He found a fire he didn’t know he carried.
One day, a telegram arrived.
Zeenat would be arriving at Bombay Central on Thursday. No mention of why. Or how long she’d stay.
Bimal kept the telegram under his pillow.
On Thursday, he went to the station. Not to greet her. Just to watch.
She stepped off the train in a grey sari. No makeup. A small suitcase. And the weight of two cities in her eyes.
She didn’t see him.
He didn’t wave.
He simply watched her disappear into the Bombay crowd.
Like a painting that refused to be framed.
7
January gave way to February, and Bombay braced for its short, uncertain spring. There was a sense of things shifting—not in dramatic revolutions, but in the way shadows lengthen quietly in the afternoon.
Bimal now lived between two worlds.
By day, he handled commissions at the traditional studio—blazing titles, glossy heroines, overdramatic villains. By evening, he took the tram to Mahim and painted abstract visions onto cracked walls, guided only by instinct and jazz records played by a saxophonist named Ramesh who refused to join any band.
“You can’t rehearse feeling,” Ramesh said. “You just play it.”
Bimal wasn’t sure if he agreed. But he liked the sound of it.
Zeenat remained a ghost.
She hadn’t contacted him. Not directly. But sometimes he’d hear whispers through Maya or Arif:
“She’s auditioning for a French-Indian co-production.”
“She walked out of a reading because the writer said her character needed saving.”
“She’s writing her own screenplay. No men in it. Not even for background.”
Bombay hadn’t changed her. But it had hardened something. She wasn’t here to be adored. She was here to claim something.
One night, Bimal stood outside her rented flat in Gamdevi and stared at the yellow light seeping through her window.
He didn’t knock.
He painted it later from memory.
A woman framed in lamplight, head bowed, surrounded by unspoken scripts.
Meanwhile, Arif had begun bringing in ideas of his own.
“Why do all our posters look like theatre stills?” he asked.
Bimal shrugged. “Because that’s how people see cinema.”
“But cinema moves. What if our posters moved, too?”
Together, they experimented with layered designs—figures caught mid-action, blurred contours, colors that pulsed rather than popped.
One producer called it “risky.” Another called it “foreign.” A third called it “bloody brilliant.”
They took the third job.
At the Mahim collective, Kapadia announced a project: a silent film told entirely through painted backdrops, shadow puppets, and live sound effects. A collaboration between five artists.
“An ode to pre-talkie dreams,” he called it.
Bimal was asked to paint the central landscape—a city that wasn’t Bombay, but carried its veins.
He used real mud for the roads. Mirror shards for streetlamps. Rust from the port for shadows.
When he stepped back, he saw something new: not just art, but place. As if Bombay had allowed him to borrow her voice, just for a moment.
And then came the invitation.
An envelope. Cream, again. Same interlocked swans.
Zeenat’s handwriting this time.
There’s a reading at Prithvi on Saturday. I’m directing it. Would you come?
He didn’t reply. He simply arrived.
The play was a single-act story. No sets. Five chairs. Four actors. And Zeenat standing behind them like a lighthouse keeper.
It was about a woman who forgets her own face after years of playing other people.
There was a line Bimal would carry for months:
“The world clapped when I cried on cue. But no one noticed when I wept for real.”
After the show, she found him near the canteen.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure either.”
They sat in silence. Then:
“Do you still paint me?” she asked.
“Only when I miss you,” he said.
She smiled. “Then stop. Or you’ll never paint anything else.”
That night, he returned home and opened his old sketchbooks. Dozens of versions of her stared back.
He took out the matchbox and, one by one, burned the pages in the courtyard.
Not out of anger.
But because she was right.
He had to find his own Bombay again.
One that wasn’t lit by her gaze.
8
March arrived with the smell of ink and agitation. Outside the studio, political posters plastered the city—elections, protests, independence anniversaries. The lines between cinema and real life grew thinner every day.
Producers began demanding more than stars. They wanted ideology. “Make the hero look like Nehru,” one barked. “Give the villain a moustache like Churchill’s,” said another.
Bimal resisted at first. Then he saw a poster he had painted—half-finished, rushed—and realized something. People weren’t just watching films anymore. They were reading them. Looking for signs, for allegiances, for promises.
He met Kapadia that week in a tea stall near Crawford Market.
“They’re turning cinema into scripture,” Bimal said.
Kapadia stirred his tea. “And why not? Scripture was always a form of theatre.”
The Mahim warehouse became a hive. New artists joined daily—dancers, calligraphers, old men who’d once painted temple walls in Tanjore. They shared techniques, stories, gossip.
Bimal began experimenting with bold, political forms—images without faces. A hand raised in dissent. A thread being snapped. A city on a tightrope.
One afternoon, Zeenat came by.
She walked through the painted corridors silently, fingers grazing textures. Then she paused before one large canvas—an unfinished skyline dripping in red.
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“I haven’t named it yet,” Bimal said.
She considered. “Call it ‘Intermission.’”
He wrote it in the corner with charcoal.
Meanwhile, Arif received his biggest offer yet—a solo exhibition of his film posters, reimagined as woodcuts.
“Me? A gallery?” he asked Bimal, stunned.
“Yes, you,” Bimal smiled. “Don’t act so surprised. You’ve been carrying fire this whole time.”
“I thought it was just hunger.”
“Same thing.”
Then came a commission unlike any other.
A new studio, backed by international funding, wanted a poster not for a film—but for the idea of Indian cinema itself.
A poster to travel across continents. To film festivals. To embassies. To dreams.
Kapadia delivered the brief with little flair. “Make it honest. Make it hurt.”
Bimal spent three sleepless nights sketching.
He rejected everything that looked too clean. Too polished.
Finally, he painted:
A broken reel unspooling across a map.
A child watching from the dark.
A woman’s face half in shadow, half in flame.
At the top, a line:
“India doesn’t watch cinema. India becomes it.”
Kapadia saw it. Nodded. “This will travel.”
The studio printed 5,000 copies.
They were sent to Prague, Venice, Montreal, Tokyo.
And suddenly, Bimal’s name was in magazines he couldn’t read.
Maya showed him a clipping from a German arts journal.
“You’re a movement now,” she said.
He laughed. “Movements fade.”
“But the mark stays.”
On Holi, the collective in Mahim held an open exhibit. No tickets. No guards. Just colour.
People walked in from the streets—rickshaw drivers, tailors, fisherwomen. They stood beside diplomats and film critics, all staring at the same walls.
Zeenat performed an improvised monologue based on a woman who had never seen a film, but had memorised every film poster on her street.
By the end, people wept. Not because they were sad.
But because they had finally seen themselves.
That night, Bimal stood on the roof of the warehouse.
Bombay pulsed below. Noisy. Bright. Cracked.
And beautiful.
Zeenat joined him, silent.
“Do you miss who we used to be?” she asked.
He thought for a moment.
“No,” he said. “Because we needed those people to become these ones.”
She touched his hand. Briefly.
Then left.
Like always.
9
It was April when the first monsoon clouds teased the Bombay skyline—early, unsure, like actors forgetting their cues.
The film industry was bracing for another shift. Studios were consolidating. Posters were shrinking. A new breed of publicity had arrived: photographers, marketers, men with typewriters and taglines.
“What happens to painters like me?” Bimal asked Kapadia.
Kapadia smiled without irony. “You evolve. Or you archive.”
Bimal thought of Arif’s exhibition, now permanent in a gallery near Marine Drive. Of Maya’s illustrated screenplay being picked up by a Parisian animator. Of Zeenat’s new film, a self-funded drama with no male lead.
Everyone was building their own stage.
Bimal returned to Grant Road. The building where he once lived was now scaffolded, its old nameplate cracked but still legible.
He knocked on the door of his former landlord, Mr. Dhanda.
“You again?” the man grunted. “Thought you’d become some kind of hero.”
Bimal grinned. “Not a hero. Just a memory with a brush.”
He asked if he could rent his old room for one month.
“Why?”
“To finish a painting.”
He spent the days alone, window open, canvas stretched on the floor. No assistants. No deadlines. Just the scent of turpentine and the low hum of the city.
He was painting Bombay—not its skyline, but its soul. A composite of everything he had seen, heard, loved.
Trains blurred into rivers. Posters into prayer flags. The sea curved like a sleeping woman.
In one corner, he painted Zeenat—half-smiling, mid-motion, never fully still.
In another, Arif—chasing a kite shaped like a cinema reel.
And in the sky, his own face—young, hopeful, dust-covered.
On the final evening, he stood before the finished work.
It wasn’t perfect.
But it was honest.
He titled it: Grant Road, 1956.
Then signed only his first name.
The next morning, he left the painting in the room with a note:
“If this wall ever falls, let someone save the canvas.”
He locked the door and walked to the station.
Victoria Terminus was as chaotic and beautiful as the day he’d first arrived.
Bimal bought a cup of tea and waited for the 9:43 to Pune.
As the train began to move, he looked back one last time.
The city stood still for a second.
Or maybe he just imagined it.
The End
