Painted Hours Under the Blitz

Artist Elsie Turner keeps painting through the London Blitz, holding to color even as the bombs fall around her.

Those raids stir memories of Nainital, the Himalayan station where she grew up as the daughter of a British civil servant, and of Tanveer Singh, the Sikh prince who once shared her sketchbooks and the stars.

An unlikely bond there became first love and a secret correspondence, until her father’s summons to England cut her off from India.

Over four decades and two continents, Elsie fights to preserve both her art and her tie to Tanveer, from the beauty, protest, and peril of colonial India to a London at war.

With past and present pressing together, love, war, and survival still ask sacrifices she has not yet made.