Roul Hemanta’s (b.1977) voice isn’t without an undertow of banter, in his finely executed paintings. Coming to Mumbai from the banks of the Subarnarekha, in Orissa, he could look at life in a big city as something adbhutam to an awed, rural outsider. While his brushwork recreates untidy knots of people, all speaking on the mobile phone—a veritable “babble”, as he says—his experience of mural painting turns the latter into corroded fragments of images, like an aged fresco, but with dappled colours like those of computer graphics. Corrugated sheets warp frayed posters and damp, sentient patches invade human space, as ground seems to merge with figures on the same surface, pronouncing the street as a fraught, heated zone.