Kari: Love and Transgressive love
Amruta Patil’s literary debut, Kari, is an ambitious graphic novel, a coming of age story with an alternative trajectory. As in many coming of age stories, the heroine Kari is young, in love, confused and trying to come to terms with an apparently meaningless existence. Her journey is however, more complicated. The object of love here is another woman, Ruth, who appears in the novel’s panels as an ideal, fantasy-world princess, who has nonetheless, abandoned Kari.
A graphic novel is a mesh of the verbal and the visual, familiar to most of us from our childhood reading of comics. It is now being used to tell every kind of tale, and Amruta Patil uses it to draw a fine picture of life in Mumbai, at least in some parts of it. Kari’s tiny flat shared with two self absorbed roommates, and extended to their boyfriends, is a microcosm of claustrophobic Mumbai. A tryptich of panels shows a bookcase dividing a bedroom into two, providing a safe haven for a couple on one side. Later, on a night-time jaunt through the city, Kari and a friend see the outlined shapes of furtive lovers. Such details are what make Kari’s Mumbai instantly recognisable.
If the book’s realism is in its visuals, what makes it work at an emotional level is the lyrical quality of the prose accompanying the panels. Describing her first meeting with Ruth, Kari says, “Whatever love laws have to be broken, the first few seconds suffice. After that, everything is a matter of time and incident”. When Ruth leaves, “the airport was a ford and she crossed over”. Occasionally this does descend into sentimentality, as when Ruth walks her “into the secret lives of ginger, cardamom, basil and anise”. Kari’s visiting parents and an older friend Angel, stand out as bastions as gravity, although of different kinds. Interestingly, the conflict with the parents’ more conventional morality is presented without a hard edge to it. Attraction and transgression are themes running through the book, with plenty of irony and self-deprecating humour greasing the wheels. That balances out the occasional page with maudlin tendencies.
The visuals are not highly dramatic or compelling in themselves; but this is one book where they flow seamlessly with the narrative. In that sense, they move the story ahead without drawing attention to themselves. The only parts where the visuals stand out are when Kari is presenting advertising storyboards for a product ridiculously named ‘Fairytale Hair’. Aptly enough, these have a glossy-pink, unreal feel to them, their colour and style a contrast with the black & white of the rest of the book. In a sense, they seem to symbolise Kari’s dual life, as she slugs it out in agency meetings and commuter trains like the rest of the working population, but her ‘real’ life flows underneath, an exploration of lost souls, the city sewers and those about to cross from this world into the other one beyond.
Kari is a daring novel in that it takes on big themes - Love, Transgressive Love, Urban Alienation, Death. It succeeds not because it brings to the table any fundamentally new ideas about the nature of these. Rather it does very well an exploration of these through one finely etched character, and in doing so, takes the reader through some very keen observations on people, love and life in a modern Indian city.
Details: Publisher: Harper Collins; Price: Rs. 295
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Funny I’ve never seen this before. I recently bought this book and loved it. The graphics are so beautiful, the writing so poetic.