Dheemi local aayegi

(From left) Sketching in progress

A young girl selling mawa cakes on a Mumbai train noticed Diya Mary Joseph, a fourth-year student at Rizvi College of Architecture, using a brush pen in the train compartment (see bottom right pic). Joseph had spotted her first; she was sketching the girl in her 10x10 centimetre self-made sketchbook. The girl wasn't Joseph's first subject. The 21-year-old picks one or a few unsuspecting subjects to document every day on her three-hour commute. And if they catch the artist mid-stroke, they're delighted to play muse, like the child with the cakes was. "She happily flipped through all of my sketches," Joseph recalls of the encounter.

One would think that Joseph sketches to pass her time commuting to college or the office where she interns. But this daily practice sprouts not from boredom; it is pure artistic expression. "I think it's something about capturing a particular moment and putting it on paper. I sketch what strikes me, like little pieces of joy," Joseph tells us. The student and artist, although she doesn't call herself one as yet, has an archive of sketches that capture the moods, struggles, and in-between moments of commuters, most of whom are women, children, and vendors in the women's train compartment. She titled it Dheemi Local Hai.

Diya Mary Joseph

Over the course of many commutes, the Kharghar resident has picked up tricks on quick and fluid sketching. "People leave before I finish sketching them. So I first capture their key characteristics and complete the sketch after they leave," she explains. As a Mumbaikar commuting in packed trains, she's learned to travel light with a few brush pens of basic colours, using the case flap to mix colours for different fabrics and skin tones.

Joseph's live sketching sessions began as nostalgic drawings of train travel in November 2020. The sketches are a colourful mix displayed on her Instagram account where final artworks are digitally transferred onto train tickets with ‘happy journey' on the top left and the sketch's title next to it. About her archive, she says, "The coexistence of people from varying backgrounds reflects an interesting mixture of stories and cultures." Joseph has no future plans for the series yet; she wants to continue documenting people passing time in trains.

Log on to: @dheemilocal_hai