ANAND SHIVRAM PARAB

Hand-painter of Bollywood sets and film hoardings, Girgaum's beloved Anand-kaka

Anand Parab smelled of turpentine and sandalwood soap, and for forty years the walls of Mumbai wore his work. Born in the Konkan village of Devrukh, he came to Girgaum at eleven to live with an uncle in a crowded chawl, where the first thing he painted was a banner for the lane's Ganeshotsav committee. A night-school teacher noticed how he drew, and at sixteen he won a place at the Sir J.J. School of Art.

After graduating he joined the scenic department at Mehboob Studio in Bandra, painting the skies, palace facades and railway stations that Hindi cinema once built from plywood and cloth. He could paint a marble pillar so convincingly that visiting actors tried to lean on it. When the studios turned to hoardings he climbed the bamboo scaffolds himself, brushing twelve-foot heroes above Lamington Road and signing every corner in tiny letters: A. S. Parab. He trained more than thirty apprentices and never raised his voice at any of them; if a line wandered, he would simply say, 'Again, but slower.'

At home he was a different kind of artist. Every year, three months before Ganeshotsav, the family's single room filled with clay as he sculpted the household Ganpati by hand, refusing plaster of Paris long before it was fashionable. He hummed Natyasangeet songs, ate vada pav standing at Chowpatty at six each evening, and kept a ledger of debts owed to him that he never once collected. He married Sulochana in 1968. He died peacefully at home in Girgaum on 11 March 2022, a half-finished sketch of a lotus on the table beside him, and is survived by Sulochana, his son Prashant, a film production designer, his daughter Meghna, a schoolteacher, and four grandchildren.

“Paint it so a tired man on the bus forgets his day for one second.”