Kavita Singh, The Economic Times, 26 June, 1993.

"Each vendor has his act. Irreverent, hyperbolic, loud; anything to turn a restive busload of passengers into an audience, and the crowded aisles into a performance space. A hundred times a day the man steps into his role. A hundred times a day he steps out. Much as each one of us enact ourselves day after day.

Nilita Vachani's film Sabzi Mandi Ke Heere is not so much about the bus vendors as it is a parable about being and becoming; about the act- and the impossibility of a reality; about the face beneath the mask, which is another mask.

The film deals with three vendors: Afsar, who makes but will not use the balms, tooth powders and surma that he sells. He is a forthright, uncomplicated man, happy in the warmth and intimacy of his family. Shakeel, the Sufi quawal, who reads the holy Koran at home and has a yearning for fame and sells "world champion" surma on buses. Above all, the film is about Hashmat the magician, ebullient and magnetic as he performs tricks and sells a magic book by day; and by night a tormented sinner who has lost his chances, his beloved, his remote and unforgiving god.

As the film interweaves the lives of these three men, sequence answers sequence. We have ambition and ease, alienation and intimacy, rectitude, sinfulness and unconscious self-acceptance. Carefully crafting inter-connections and parallel themes, the film has the quality of a densely textured piece of prose. It is not telling a story; it is only showing how, when we construct ourselves, we make our universes as well."

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