Brimming with promise, poignance and candour, Mrianl Sen’s short films from 1986-87 uploaded on YouTube have their own liquid existence. Ministrations on aesthetics, social and political realities, and how people continue to evolve around love, these are a set of 12 short films originally called Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas. The shorts run for about 21-23 minutes each and read like deeply personal reveries, possibly hidden between the pages of an old, forgotten diary, discovered merely by chance. Starring revered actors from that time of the Indian film industry, Neena Gupta, Aparna Sen and the late Girish Karnad, the short films take the now deceased director's legacy forward.

Meant to be devoured with a thrilling edge, these shorts are dense with the easy, known intimacies of Sen’s feature films, making secret connections to the essence shared by seemingly unrelated things. It is through these connections that while watching them, I tried to feel my way into the pith of these various stories. Some about the mystery of love and if it evaporates over time, others about the various turns of friendships, still others about identity and the strange faces we assume as we age and then about the way we hold on to our dead. The shorts act as an estuary where people’s social clothing with which they dress their raw, unknowable selves, meets with their search for a way that will be grasped at and understood by the ones who matter.