NEEL MUKHERJEE

HOME ABOUT BOOKS ARTICLES & REVIEWS EVENTS CONTACT

Kari by Amruta Patil

24/04/08, Biblio

Given the central lesbian theme of both books, comparisons of

Amruta Patil’s first graphic novel, Kari (which must count as a
publishing milestone for it is, to my knowledge, India’s first gay
graphic novel), with Alison Bechdel’s much-lauded memoir, Fun
Home, were perhaps inevitable. Indeed, in a recent interview, Patil
has acknowledged her great admiration for Bechdel. But the
differences between Kari and Fun Home are much more eloquent.
The obvious one, of course, is that Bechdel’s was a memoir, Kari is
fiction. While Fun Home represented a rare example of a graphic
novel in which the artist could also write soaring, singing prose, I
find Patil’s graphics more evocative, more beautiful than Bechdel’s
and her prose, although marred very occasionally by a tendency
towards a posturing colloquial hipness, also a thing of radiant beauty:
witty, smart and swaggering, brightly knowing without ever falling
into archness, illuminated by frequent flashes of poetry. Here is an
example, which talks about a fruit bowl in someone’s home:

I play with fruit that the girls and I are too broke to buy. Avocado,
kiwi, mangosteen. There are some fruits you do not want to venture
into alone. A peach, for one, creature of texture and smell, sings like
a siren. A fruit that lingers on your fingertips with unfruitlike
insistence, fuzzy like the down on a pretty jaw. Figs are dark
creatures too, skins purple as loving bruises. A fig is one hundred per
cent debauched. Lush as a smashed mouth. There, I said it again:
Lush.

Keep in mind that the speaker, Kari (the protagonist), is entranced

by the sexual/romantic possibilities of a new arrival at her office,
Susan Lush from NYC, even before she has arrived; the very name,
Susan Lush, sends her into a rhapsody: ‘my heart is an expanse of
green grass at the sight of the name. … Can you see her the way I do?
/
Susan, Lush against watermelon walls. Susan, Lush against Grecian
blue or white. Susan, Lush and tan on a bone-white beach. Susan,
Lush and succulent, all tan, all sun.’ Hold that in your head and the
passage above swims into a different view and its sexualised excess
becomes not only wholly pardonable but also tethered and necessary
in vital ways: it sheds light on the inner life of Kari, thus giving her
character more roundedness, making her more convincing and
credible. This is not a free-floating moment of empty erotic-
allegorising, or an unanchored bit of purple; it is a peek into a
character’s interiority. That it is also smart, sassy and sexy is to its
enormous credit.

But I race ahead. The story, first. Kari begins with the attempted
double-suicide of a pair of lovers – Kari, our heroine, and her
girlfriend, Ruth – plunging from the top of a building. Ruth is saved
by a safety net and escapes to another country. Kari falls into a sewer
– a potent, if obvious, metaphor, that, considering what is to come –
and resumes her life in ‘smog city’, Bombay. All this unfolds in the
first seven pages, leaving the rest of the book, over one hundred
pages, for Kari to narrate her story. There are two immediate
reference points to Kari’s life: home and work. The former is Crystal
Palace, a 2 BHK shared with two other young women, Billo and
Delna, and two permanent houseguests, Zap and Orgo, boyfriends of
Billo and Delna respectively. Work is at a soul-destroying ad agency,
where Kari and her co-copywriter, Lazarus, are on their thirty-sixth
rewrite of an advertisement for an international hair-product brand
called Fairytale Hair.

As Kari moves, numbed, through the twilight world of the newly-

bereaved – for that is what the world feels like after the abrupt end of
a life-changing love – we begin to see her in her other relationships
and friendships, all delineated with precision, economy and the
ringing clarity of truth. There is the long-distance relationship with
her parents; the spiked, needy, irritating yet sustaining nature of
female friendships in her interactions with Billo and Delna; the more
ambivalent friendship with Lazarus, who pines away for a distant
girlfriend but is not above writing the odd embarrassingly awful love
poem for Kari. Above all, there is her friendship with Angel, who is
in the terminal stages of cancer, ‘the first actively dying person I’d
met in my life.’ Kari adds, ‘It’s as potent a connection as first love.’ In
a book so strong on the subtleties and nuances of all kinds of
relationships, this is its most powerful and most moving, its beating
heart.

Woven through all this, like a bright seam, is a slowly unfurling

meditation on the city itself, seething, polluted, overpopulated,
hellish yet alive, the great survivor. ‘Mad Ireland’ hurt Yeats into
poetry, according to Auden; a similar claim can be made for Patil and
/
Bombay: it is possible to see Kari as a poem written to and for
Bombay, incontestably the great metropolis of the country. Over the
last few years, I’ve begun my slow acquaintance with the city, so my
heart gives a little leap when I recognise familiar loci, such as ‘Soul
Fry’, the restaurant in Pali Market, with its aquarium of half-blind
tetras and guppies, where Kari and Lazarus dine frequently. Familiar
feelings are articulated:

I try to breathe as little as I can to prevent smog city from choking

me. I wish I could detach my lungs. Every day, the city seems to be
getting heavier, and her varicose veins fight to break out of her skin.
Soon we must mutate—thick skin and resilient lungs – to survive this
new reality.

At other times, a darker commentary, encompassing both the

huddled, poor masses and their involuntary observers, takes shape:

Laz and I have been walking around the city at night, camera in
hand, watching homeless people deep in slumber. They sleep on
roadsides, under carts and benches, on platforms. Arms holding
bodies, legs under legs, a defensive ball against the threats that whiz
past at night. It is an appalling thing, this watching. If our subjects
were wealthier, we’d be arrested for being peeping toms. As it is, our
walk makes for arty b&w pictures of grim urban life.      

It is amazing how much Patil packs into a book this slim.

That passage just quoted above also serves as a valuable point of

entry into thinking about her style. Note how she modulates
sympathy into scathing irony with that last sentence; throughout the
book, this kind of clear-eyed, undeluded irony sings in counterpoint
to the incipient pretentiousness of ‘While I sleep, Ruth must be
striding towards a flame-coloured calling’ or to the more serious
error of the jarring and unassimilated strand of fantasy/magical-
realism in the ‘boatman’ theme: ‘The day I hauled myself out of the
sewer – the day of the double suicide – I promised the water I’d
return her favour. That I’d unclog her sewers when she couldn’t
breathe. I earned me a boat that night.’ We watch Kari rowing on the
sewers and waterways of Bombay, unblocking the drains and pipes, a
gamine, androgynous cross between Charon, who ferries dead souls
across the Styx, and Villanelle from Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion.
The latter, an unwholesome influence, is even checked in in a panel
where we see Kari reading Sexing the Cherry, while the former
allusion is laboured, especially when the dying Angel tells Kari, ‘You
have a sign above your head that says “boatman.” People who are
about to kick the bucket will be drawn to you in hordes.’

/
The book is saved from all this by its sense of humour – ironic, self-
consciously bathetic, aslant and gleaming, sometimes even hitting
perfect notes of well-turned jokes. An early moment occurs when
Kari sees Bostiao, ‘a large orange-eyed tomcat’, sitting on a tree,
‘yawning and blinking in the sun.’ ‘He likes to be where there is a
bird’s-eye view’, she adds. I suppose you have to be an obsessive cat-
lover, as Patil and I are, to savour that joke but it is a good one.
Towards the end, when Kari decides to mount a final rebellion
against the intractable fact of her womanhood and its attendant
cultural notions of femininity, all of which she finds stifling, she
decides to get a 2mm buzz cut. The barber, who has assumed she
wants a ‘lady’s boycut’, is shocked to hear that and opines, ‘Madam,
won’t looking good. I have Lady’s patterns. … Madam, face looking
boy type.’ Quite apart from the fact that the dialogue is spot-on, it
shows through the perspective of a stranger’s vision how Kari’s
furious chafing against all female attributes – breasts, long hair,
menstruation – and her incandescent desire to be as boyish, as close
to k.d. lang, as possible, are both endearing and absurd. This ability
to laugh at one’s own self, while in no way negating the very real
struggles with sexuality and the outer forms it takes, is a definition of
not only good sense of humour but also a deeply intelligent good
sense of humour.

For all the centrality of its theme of lost love and subsequent
survival, to me Kari is overwhelmingly a book about friendship. The
glances backwards to Kari’s relationship with Ruth, beautifully
rendered as they are, pale beside the angular, idiosyncratic, waspish
yet deeply affectionate bond between the cantankerous, dying Angel
and Kari, who turns twenty-one three-quarters of the way into the
book. The book is worth reading for this exquisitely witty and
crackling friendship alone. In three unsentimental pages Patil
sketches out Angel’s death; I could barely keep my hands from
shaking after reading those three immensely vast, restrained, even
austere pages. The final lines, under a page showing Angel’s utterly
vacant room, cleared of all her possessions, with a diagonal shadow
raking it in half, are worth quoting:

I did not ever revisit Angel’s street. There was no funeral. Her body
was donated to the LMJ Medical College, not far from the ad agency
I work in. Angel found it vastly entertaining that young medical
school boys would be experimenting with her. (‘At my age, you take
what you get.’)

More than anything else, I find it hard to quote my friends in closed

brackets.

Here is a writer who knows exactly when to leave off, who has
learned, in her first book, miraculously, the resounding, articulate
/
quality of that last proposition from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
‘Whereof nothing can be said, thereof one must remain silent.’