During this first visit, Achal remained merely an observer while Manav guided the conversation with Shukla, asking him questions about his process and more. It was overwhelming for Achal to be handling the camera and sound all by himself. “I couldn’t shoot through the first half of the day. I was just so engrossed in listening to him that I couldn’t objectively be a camera person. If he looked at me while shooting, my camera would just drop,” Achal smiles, adding that he was just all over the place. “I would be placing one camera, running around with the other, and I was not very pleased with the handhelds,” he says. He aimed to correct that during the second visit when he brought more quietness into the frames.

The conversational nature of Chaar phool hai aur duniya hai made the edit process difficult for Achal, who wasn’t able to arrive at a version that he was happy with for the longest time. “I was trying to make it more than what it was,” he says. “So, I just accepted the limitations of the conversation and tried shaping it in a certain way.” However, through the visuals, Achal tries to go beyond what is being spoken about. His shots evoke a similar tenderness that is present in the poems of Shukla. Closing in on the rustle of leaves from a tree in the backyard of his home or capturing the tiny movements of birds, Achal creates a mood piece of textures. In a delightful, layered image, he points the camera at a wall gleaming with afternoon sunlight as a faint shadow of Shukla falls on it as he walks around. Supporting this is Shukla’s frail yet stern voice as he reminisces about the film which Mani Kaul made on his novel, Naukar ki kameez. The two shared a lively collaboration until Kaul’s untimely death. The filmmaker was in the process of adapting another one of Shukla’s novels. Has Achal ever thought of making a film on Shukla’s books? He smiles and takes a breath before answering, “I don’t think I am capable of doing that. I haven’t even entertained that idea,” he says. “But, at some point, maybe I will try out a short story by him.”