“So this is the most number of ambassadors at any given time in the history of independent India,” Ananth Padmanabhan joked on Tuesday evening, looking out at a crowd at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, that included a current ambassador and several former ones. Behind him, on every wall, were the iconic yellow cars he meant.Padmanabhan, the CEO of HarperCollins India, is also a novelist and photographer. His first solo show, on Calcutta, in 201, was also held at the India Habitat Centre.No Refusal is the result of nearly three decades of what he calls “an irrational love,” which stemmed from the moment he spotted the distinctive cabs when he got off the Rajdhani Express at Howrah in January 1998. He tells me his affection for the car predates this conscious sighting, as a mint-green Ambassador brought newborn Padmanabhan home from the hospital for the first time.The show’s title comes from the words painted on the doors of Calcutta’s cabs, a government directive meant to ensure no passenger was left stranded. “A large part of our anxiety when we use public transport is, will the guy take you and go or not? Is he going to fleece you, and how much more are they going to charge?” he says. “To have a government directive become a design language, how can you not appreciate it?”The Ambassador was first manufactured near Calcutta in 1957. It ferried politicians and bureaucrats and later became the city’s standard taxi. Its production stopped in 2014, and the distinctive yellow fleet, a cultural ambassador of Calcutta in itself, has been disappearing since. “You don’t see this car anymore on the street,” he says.On the wallsThe exhibitions showcased images of the Ambassador cutting a path on wet evenings with a slow shutter; in another, the girders stay sharp while buses and taxis blur into streaks, and elsewhere, an orange tarpaulin glows above a pavement home as a cab rushes past. Ask him how the pictures taken over three decades seem to share a synchronous palette of reds, blacks, whites and, of course, yellow; he points to two pictures with the same palette, taken years apart. “They say the greatest artists plagiarise themselves,” he says.Outside Sealdah Station, he says, he waited for a yellow taxi to pass between two white busts of Mahatma Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh. “I had to stand there for a very long time to get that car in between the two of them,” he says. “And luckily, in that shot, everything else is white.” Every other car in the frame is white.Story continues below this ad The rear corner of an Ambassador in a gilded frame. (Indian Express/Aishwarya Khosla)Some of the cars are already blackened, reduced to a crushed boot in a heap of rubbish. The most playfully incongruous piece, a close-up of an Ambassador’s tail light presented like a portrait in a national gallery, is cased in an ornate gilded frame. “My one quirk and personal tribute,” he calls it.How do these images differ from the vast landscapes of Ladakh? He says the landscapes allowed him no control over light or weather. With the Ambassador, “I had control, but I also didn’t have control,” he says.The driversOne wall is given over to portraits of drivers posed with their taxis. The show’s poster is a grey-bearded driver sitting in his open boot, a cigarette at his lips, looking straight at the lens.Talking to them, Padmanabhan found they were curious why anyone would want to capture them, and then came the grief. “The impending grief that the cars will go away. The fact that these are part of their family and that they will be taken away,” he says. “They didn’t even want to see the image. They were just amazed that somebody felt for their car the way I did.” They will get easy loans for new cars, he acknowledges. “But it is like yanking away your child.”Story continues below this ad“Imagine the amount of experiences they would have had, driving you or me, getting somebody to an airport on time or getting somebody to a hospital on time,” he says. “So they thought that, okay, finally somebody’s noticing what I do for a living.”A proposalWhat would he like authorities to do? “If I were running Calcutta, I would hold back 500 of these cars, put eco-friendly engines in them, who cares? It’s the most beautiful car. Keep 500 of them and insist that five-star hotels and the government will only use the yellow car.”“Generations have been driven around in it,” he says. “Generations would have gone on a first date, taken their bride for a wedding. You know, an expectant mother rushed to a hospital to deliver a baby.”Within a couple of years, he believes, the car will be gone from the streets. “And Calcutta, for me at least, will be a little less beautiful than before.”