When a Mastodon conversation with Ronan McDonnell meandered into the territory of ghost signs, I was reminded that I had an incomplete post sitting in my drafts about a faded, painted advertisement that I had photographed in Pune back in May. Since most of my interest in photographing signs comes from the perspective of letter design, I haven’t always been drawn to dilapidated examples where shapes are hard to discern. Reading Sam Roberts and Roy Reed’s Ghost Signs: A London Story changed that, just as following Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s documentation of public clocks has made me pay greater attention to clock towers.
The ghost sign in question caught my eye when I was in Budhwar Peth, standing inside the compound of the Poona City Post Office trying to capture the lettering on the building façade. I quickly snapped a few photographs, and really only thought about it again during an email exchange with Sam. I sent him one of the pictures, and he, in turn, posted it on Mastodon. That kicked off a collaborative effort to uncover the story of this sign.
The Devanagari text was straightforward: I could make out the words ब्रेसिअर्स (brassieres) and बनिअन्स (vests), and a little digging revealed that there is indeed a brand of innerwear called Lisha, whose logo matches what you see on the top of the sign. The mystery was the Latin text interspersed in between. Was it a spelling variant of ghee, and if yes, how did it fit an advertisement for undergarments? Ghee was my first guess, and Abhinav agreed, but there wasn’t enough convincing evidence.
Based on the amount of peeling paint, Dan suggested that the Latin and Devanagari texts may belong to two different signs from different times. The text had looked a little like Gluco, but that didn’t make much sense until Anirban chimed in: “may be It was a Gluco biscuit ad.” You see, I didn’t know that Parle-G biscuits were originally called Gluco; turns out I wasn’t the only one either! I was able to find Gluco’s logo, and the lettering on the sign looked just like it. Lo-and-behold, we had our answer.
The Gluco name gave way to Parle-G in the 1980s, so that gave an estimate about how old that lettering is. Anirban did some more sleuthing and found that a lingerie company called Lisha was incorporated in 1991. Could it be one and the same? If so, the the second set of lettering would be newer by about a decade, confirming Dan’s theory. We tried to date the Lisha lettering more accurately by trying to find out when Pune switched from five-digit phone numbers to six-digit ones, but couldn’t find any information online. And so, that is as far as we got in our quest. Who knew ghost signs could be so fun?