The rain had always belonged to Nirmal Karmakar. For six decades it had fallen from his brushes across the faces of heroes and heroines, streamed down painted windows and gathered in imaginary puddles beneath the feet of lovers. He knew how to make a wet street glisten beneath a streetlamp, how to give a woman’s hair the damp weight of a monsoon evening, and how to suggest the loneliness of a man waiting beneath a broken umbrella. Other painters could reproduce a film star’s face. Nirmal could make the viewer feel the weather around it. That had been his gift, though the city had never thought to give the man himself much recognition.
His workshop, in a lane off Chitpur Road, smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, damp jute and frying telebhaja. Brushes stood in old Horlicks bottles; tins of vermilion, chrome yellow, Prussian blue and burnt sienna crowded the shelves. Once, the room rang with the ebullient chatter of painters, apprentices, colour mixers and labourers. Now, at eighty-one, Nirmal spent most afternoons there alone, his shoulders stooped from a lifetime of looking upwards and his fingers knotted with arthritis.
He had entered the trade in 1963, barely twenty, under the stern tutelage of Dhiren-da, who insisted that a painter unable to draw a convincing human eye had no business painting cinema hoardings. In those days, the façades of Chaplin, Minerva, Mitra and Basusree wore enormous painted declarations of romance, tragedy and adventure. Teams stretched canvases across wooden frames, sketched faces in charcoal and built colour until familiar actors towered above the traffic. The paintings were seldom exact copies of publicity photographs. A hero acquired broader shoulders, a heroine more luminous eyes, and a villain a darkness visible from the other end of the street. Distributors supplied the photographs; the painters supplied the dreams.
The decline arrived quietly. Offset-printed posters reduced the demand for hand-painted work; then computers entered design studios. Images could be enlarged, altered and reproduced with a precision no brush could match. When large-format digital printers and flex banners became affordable, a job that had occupied a dozen people for days could be completed in hours. Apprentices left, followed by colour mixers, lettering men and scaffold builders. Some painters learnt computer graphics; others took up house painting or signboards. Many could not afford the machines or the training. Nirmal did not hate technology. He knew the world could not stand still. What troubled him was how an entire fraternity could disappear without the city noticing.
One humid August afternoon, a representative of a property development company arrived with an unusual request. An old cinema hall in central Calcutta had been acquired for redevelopment. The building would make way for a shopping complex, but the new owners had agreed to preserve one exterior wall as a reminder of the cinema hall that had stood there. On it was a badly damaged hand-painted mural from the 1960s, depicting a monsoon street from a forgotten Bengali film. They wanted someone familiar with the old techniques to restore it before construction began. Someone had remembered Nirmal.
When he first saw the wall, he stood silently before it. Plaster had peeled away; old posters and dampness had reduced the painting to a palimpsest of indistinct colours. A woman’s face surfaced beneath flaking blue. The outline of a tram dissolved into a brown stain. Yet he recognised the curve of an umbrella and the particular way a window frame had been shaded. It might have been one of his earliest works, painted when he was barely twenty. He could not remember every evening spent on the scaffold, or every hand that had helped him. The years had made strangers of some memories, but the mural stirred an affection he could not name.
He accepted the commission. The company gave him six months before the wall would be enclosed within the new complex. Rini agreed to help, at first out of concern that his failing eyesight and unsteady hands would not manage the work. Together they began by carefully removing the layers that obscured the original surface. Nirmal studied each exposed patch, sometimes spending a morning deciding how much could safely be recovered. He mixed small quantities of pigment, tested them on scraps of canvas and waited for each layer to settle. The smell of turpentine returned, and with it came fragments of a vanished life.
As the street scene emerged, Nirmal began to remember. There was a tea stall beneath a striped awning, a tram conductor leaning towards the road, a woman carrying vegetables and a crowd hurrying through the rain. The film’s leading actors occupied the centre. Around them, ordinary figures moved through the street. One afternoon, while restoring a man beside the tea stall, Nirmal remembered Gopal, a fellow painter with a crooked smile who carried his brushes in a wooden box tied with red cloth. He adjusted the painted face until it held Gopal’s expression, added the little box beside his feet and wrote the name Gopal on its lid. Rini noticed, but did not ask.
A few days later, another face returned to him: a young apprentice who ran errands, carrying newspapers beneath his shirt when the rain grew heavy. Nirmal painted him into the crowd with a folded newspaper under his arm and wrote his name across its front page. Then came a labourer who hauled cans of paint up the scaffolding, a lettering artist whose Bengali script had been admired by distributors, a master colour mixer who could produce a dozen shades of green without a formula, and an old scaffold builder who had once saved a painter from a fall. Nirmal found a place for each of them in the street.
He gave the colour mixer a book with a rainbow on its cover. The lettering artist carried a notebook filled with elegant script. The scaffold builder bore a coil of rope over one shoulder; another figure held a bottle of linseed oil with a name on its label. Names appeared on umbrella handles, badges, book covers and little objects carried through the rain. Each face had a story; each prop offered a clue to the work its owner had done.
The mural began to gather people as a river gathers tributaries. Sometimes a colour recalled a colleague; sometimes the sound of a tram or the smell of wet earth brought back someone whose name Nirmal had not spoken in forty years. He remembered men who had died young, a woman who mixed pigments for her husband, a boy who grew up to become a painter, and a labourer who had once shared his lunch with him. Their lives had been modest, their names largely forgotten, but every one of them had helped create the painted world Calcutta once displayed above its streets.
The granddaughter who was studying graphic design, who had considered her grandfather’s brushes obsolete, began learning how to hold one, judge the thickness of pigment and let a colour dry before laying another over it. She discovered that what she had thought of as imperfections were often the marks of a human hand.
By the end of the sixth month, the monsoon street had returned. The actors remained at its centre, surrounded by a hundred figures moving through the rain. Every face was different; every figure carried an object; every object held a name. Nirmal had painted a hundred faces and written a hundred names. He told Rini little about the full meaning of what he had done. She suspected it was a tribute to the old fraternity, but did not yet know how many of the people whose likenesses filled the wall had been found.
The shopping complex opened on a bright winter morning. Its courtyard enclosed the preserved cinema wall beneath a glass roof. When the covering was removed, visitors applauded and raised their phones to photograph the mural. Nirmal stood near a pillar in his best cream kurta, his old wooden brush box in Rini’s hands. He noticed a group that did not move on with the crowd. They stood close to the glass, pointing, whispering, studying the smaller figures rather than the film stars.
He went nearer. An elderly man with a walking stick was looking at the painted figure carrying a wooden box. Nirmal recognised him at once. Gopal. His shoulders had stooped, his hair had vanished, but the crooked smile remained. Beside him stood a woman who introduced herself as the daughter of the apprentice with the newspaper. Others had come with children, spouses and old friends. One recognised the lettering artist; another had found the scaffold builder. Some of the people in the mural were still alive. Others had come back through the memories of their families.
Nirmal turned to Rini, astonished. While helping him paint, she had searched for the people whose stories he told her. She had understood that this was no ordinary restoration. Her grandfather was making a record of a community for which no archive existed. She had traced old addresses, spoken to neighbourhood residents and followed whatever slender clue she could find. Where the person had died, she sought a relative or friend. She had sent invitations with photographs of the figures and their names. Now, before the wall, families were discovering fathers, mothers, uncles and grandparents in a painted street they had never known existed.
Gopal approached, leaning on his stick, and placed a trembling hand on Nirmal’s shoulder. “You remembered the old box,” he said, laughing softly. Nirmal could only nod. Around them, the courtyard filled with stories. A woman told her grandson about the great-grandfather whose name appeared on a bottle of linseed oil. A man pointed out the rope carried by his father. Strangers became connected through the people they recognised, and the mural became a gathering place for a world that had scattered.
Only then did Nirmal understand what his last great work had become. He had begun by restoring a forgotten film scene. Somewhere along the way, he had restored the people who had made such scenes possible. He had spent his life painting the dreams of others; at the end, he had painted the hands that built those dreams.
Nirmal did not live long enough to see the mural become a landmark. But Rini continued to visit it. Over the years, word of the hundred faces spread like a treasure story. Art students came to study the brushwork and pigments. Film historians visited to learn about the lost craft of cinema publicity. Older residents searched the painted crowd for familiar names. Some found someone they had known; others discovered the stories of people whose lives had once brushed against their own.
The shopping complex changed its tenants, but the wall remained behind glass. On rainy afternoons, the painted tram seemed almost to move, the umbrellas tilted against the wind, and the hundred figures appeared to travel together through the city they had helped create. Among them was the young Nirmal, unaware that his work would one day bring a forgotten world back to life.
Perhaps art cannot defeat time. It can, however, persuade it to pause. A hundred faces had survived the disappearance of the hands that painted heroes and dreams, and a hundred names had found their way back into the memory of a city. The rain had never really stopped falling on Nirmal’s street. It had simply learnt to fall across generations.
Author’s Note
There was a time when the streets of Calcutta announced the arrival of a new film through enormous hand-painted hoardings. Long before digital screens and flex banners took over the city’s walls, artists climbed bamboo scaffolds with brushes, pigments and an extraordinary command of colour. They painted heroes larger than life, heroines with luminous eyes and monsoon skies that seemed to hold the promise of an entire story. Their work was visible to thousands, yet the names of the people who created those images rarely travelled beyond the workshops where they were made.
A Hundred Faces is a tribute to that forgotten fraternity: the painters, colour mixers, lettering artists, apprentices, labourers and scaffold builders whose hands helped shape the visual memory of a city. The story imagines what might happen if one ageing artist, before laying down his brushes for the last time, decided to remember not merely the craft but the people behind it. Nirmal Karmakar’s mural becomes more than a restoration of an old film scene. It becomes an archive of lives that history might otherwise have allowed to fade.
At its heart, this is also a story about inheritance. Rini begins by seeing her grandfather’s brushes as relics of an obsolete trade, only to discover that they hold a language no machine can entirely reproduce: the small imperfections, the patience, the touch of a human hand. Perhaps every generation has something to learn from the crafts and people it is tempted to leave behind.
We often remember the faces painted on the hoardings, but seldom the hands that painted them. This story is my small attempt to remember those hands, and to give a hundred forgotten names a place on the wall.
Copyright © 2026 TRISHIKH DASGUPTA
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trishikh Dasgupta
Adventurer, philosopher, writer, painter, photographer, craftsman, innovator, or just a momentary speck in the universe flickering to leave behind a footprint on the sands of time... READ MORE
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