Nobody designed this wall. It happened — one election poster pasted over another, one coat of paint applied over a crack that never quite got fixed, one monsoon after another peeling a little more away until what’s left looks less like disrepair and more like a deliberate collage.
Kolkata’s older neighbourhoods are full of surfaces like this: colonial-era brick underneath, layers of political posters, hand-painted shop signage, and the particular blue-green mildew bloom that only happens in a city this humid. Conservationists call it decay. Photographers who spend enough time here start calling it texture.
This wall sits on a lane that’s scheduled for repainting next year as part of a municipal beautification drive — which is exactly why it was worth stopping the bike and photographing it now, before the mosaic gets flattened back into a single, tidy colour.
