Only Kolkata in its eccentric quaintness can have someone like Partha Mukherjee whose art is hearing tales of people he has never met before. He is not a Boxwallah like the “magnificent misfit,” Bobby Mitter, or an eccentric filmmaker like Raja Das, or navigator Manab Pal, who built a floating hotel in Kolkata. He is a quiet, bespectacled amateur painter who knows everyone in the world has a story to tell: happy, tragic, doubt ridden, achievements and defeats. Mukherjee is there for them all with a cafe as a living studio. Known by some as “the Kolkata coffee man”—he listens to stories of strangers—sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. He paints the conversation. Not portraits, but abstract, intuitive renderings of what they carry within.
Based in Kolkata, the 38-year-old Mukherjee posts simple invitations on social media: “I’ll be at this café today, from 3 to 6. Come talk, if you need to.” He partners with independent cafés. The sessions are called Mindtalk. People come in uncertain, unsure. They start cautiously, talking about work stress, upcoming exams, strained family dynamics. As they speak, Mukherjee begins to paint: listening not only with his ears, but with his intuition, his brush moving instinctively across the page. The works become deeply personal. “It might be a maze. A birdcage. A melting clock. I don’t always know what it’s going to be until I finish,” he says. “But they get it. They always get it,” he smiles.
A month ago, a teenage boy walked in—quiet, curious. “Maybe Class 11,” Mukherjee recalls. Nudged by Mukherjee’s subtle questions, his story surfaced: both parents work long hours and argue often. No siblings, no grandparents, no one to ask how his day went. The house feels empty. “He just misses being heard,” Mukherjee says. They spoke for about 90 minutes—about school, a girl he liked, a class trip. “Nothing extraordinary,” Mukherjee says.
Then there are the heavy stories. One woman came to him after losing two husbands. She would often slip into depression. “I tried to show her how we’re all connected,” he says. “That everyone who leaves also leaves behind something good. And it’s our responsibility to hold on to the good. I didn’t say it out loud. But somehow, the abstract painting said it for me. She smiled when she saw it.” That smile, he says, is the gift he always looks for.
He charges, unofficially, for a black coffee. And people give what they can. “I have no fixed fee,” says Mukherjee, whose own journey began in 2020, during Cyclone Amphan. As Bengal reeled from the devastation, many turned to relief work. Mukherjee did too. “But as I started meeting people and offering help, I realised not everyone is struggling because of money,” he says. “Some people are just stuck with thoughts that won’t untangle.” That’s when it struck him: Listening is an art.
Mukherjee has completed online certification courses in Psychological First Aid from Johns Hopkins University and in the Social Context of Mental Health and Wellness from the University of Toronto. While not a clinical therapist, he offers a perspective that is both informed and deeply personal. The paintings themselves are rendered in an unusual medium: coffee. “It started by accident. I dipped my brush into my coffee cup once, and thought ‘wait, this works’,” he smiles. Since then, he’s become something of a connoisseur of café blends—not just for sipping, but for staining. Like his people subjects, “every café’s brew is different, the tones change. After they brew, the grounds stay in the filter. I take those home. Cafés never charge for it.” He boils the grounds again, extracts tones—deep umber, warm sepia, pale tan to paint with.
The cup never brimmeth over in coffee with Mukherjee.