Book Review: Kari

 Kari’s smouldering black eyes drilled into my soul from the stark cover of Amruta Patil’s graphic novel for almost a month before I finally gathered the courage to dive into the turgid dark waters of her Soul. Kari, the protagonist, inhabits the same time and space that I called home for several years- we might even have taken the same local train to work or back- yet, superficially, we couldn’t be more different.

Brooding, melancholy, drawn to the dark, Kari introspects on the urban lifestyle, on sexuality and people’s reaction of fidelity, on lesbian relationships and how the heterosexual society often sees it as a temporary deviant, on paternal expectations and the guilt of children, on domestic violence and the studied silence of society when it encounters it. As Kari navigates the labyrinth of ‘Smog City’, collecting symbols like we collect ticket stubs, you start seeing glimpses of yourself in Kari and of Kari in you.

The book is in sombre colours. Like the world Kari inhabits- 

“Smog city looks even more anaemic in the sun. Left to itself long enough, everything in the world withers, wastes, fades away to brown and grey. Tarpaulin and trash. Cinders and ash. Vegetables turn to potty. Red curtains colourless, add to this, streams of women and women, like rotos and slaves, in equally tired colours. We are scared of too much colour.”

But when you least expect it, that monochromatic world gets drenched in colour. Sometimes, it is the colour of the magical, sometimes of the mundane. But colour it is.

Some of her musings are spot on-

“There are settling girls, and there are unsettling girls. The ones who seem to have it in them to be flyers are the ones who want to snuggle into settling. The ones who look as settled as old housedogs want to twist their way into flying. Necessarily, you must be defensive about being a settling sort of girl.”

“The Airlines lady who travels in the same compartment as us day after day, has bruises on her arms and face today and her eyes keep welling, but no one asks her why. Our eyes dart towards her, but we go back to travelling in too much proximity. Two inches from one another and expressionless.”

“I wait to watch their train leave just as I waited to watch their train pull in. I wait till they have disappeared. Until the next train pulls in. I have temporarily regressed to being a guilt ridden and miserable child.”

Amruta Patil’s ‘Kari’, for all practical purposes, is the first graphic novel for adults that I read, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. Having read it, I now wonder if the bar is set too high.