Mumbai's working life in watercolour

Zainab Tambawalla’s vibrant watercolours capture everyday life, work and exhaustion in Mumbai

- Rahul Jacob

When Zainab Tambawalla heard that a hospital building with an ornate, antique gate she had admired on a heritage walk in Mumbai might be demolished, she wrote an email to the owners requesting that they preserve the extensive wrought iron grillwork.

Closer to home, she was dismayed to find that the elegant wooden signage outside her father’s paint shop had been removed. “Some moments will be gone before you take out your notebook,” says Tambawalla, who self-deprecatingly describes her work as “urban sketching”.

In her first solo show, a high-spirited parade of vibrant watercolours entitled Seen Unseen, Tambawalla reveals herself as a miniaturist of the metropolis, also a conservationist of a kind (the exhibition is on at 47-A Khotachi Wadi till 4 January). In a painting of a telephone repairman, with one of his feet elevated as he hunches over a mesh of wires, she gives us in one image the complexity of the infrastructure of telephony of yesteryear and the skill required to keep landlines working even as they slowly become a relic of the past. Her rendering of a neighbourhood knife sharpener is an ode to a skill that might eventually become a victim of our increasingly throw away culture.

Tambawalla brings that intensity of observation and depiction to inanimate objects as well. Her series of paintings of electricity junction boxes and feeder-styled boxes are in reds so vivid that they have the glamour of that other emblem of a bygone era, the London phone booth. But, as they are in Indian cities, these junction boxes are festooned with faded adverts.