New Delhi, June 19 -- The building, like many buildings in Kolkata, had seen better days. An old three-storey house, with slatted windows and trellis patterns on its balcony, faded by sun and rain. These days houses like these are routinely torn down to become nondescript apartment buildings. The luckier ones find a second incarnation as trendy cafes that serve top-notch nostalgia alongside nondescript Americanos.

But this one is different.

Its walls have become a canvas. Figures, larger than life-size, of ambiguous gender, gaze out on to the street from its walls. On the day I went there last week, the delicate jamdani one wore glowed neon yellow against the peach pink of the wall in the late afternoon sun. Another stood in a casually ...