Amruta Patil’s Kari is a distinct contribution to Indian Graphic novel writing with its focus on society, psyche and beyond. Set in an urban landscape, dealing with the stream of consciousness of a working girl desperately seeking to curve out an individual niche in all the walks of life, the novel explores a mindscape that can solely germinate and develop in an Indian urban context.

Kari’s world is full of the urban dichotomies. Kari and Ruth’s relationship shudders even the progressive minds, while other girls in Kari’s hostel can smoke and booze all night long with their male friends. The desire to be an individual is branded as being an iconoclastic misanthrope, while the sheer commodification of herself makes a girl the happiest.( remember, Delna getting ecstatic for being selected as ‘Aishwariya’s legs’ in a certain T.V. commercial!)
    
In the midst of this, carries on her exploration of the city, of its people, of love, of herself. The journey mystically meanders from the well-lit streets, the dazzling discotheques, the dark by-lanes but perhaps most fruitfully through the sewers of the city, which Kari is desperate to clean up. Amruta’s magic realism turns poignantly metaphoric here. The revolutions in the macro society can perhaps best be initiated through our micro attempts to become the ‘boatman’, cleaning up private sewers.

The issue of the body is something that gets eerily tangible in Kari. The first picture of the snapping of the veins, the coming close of the women in love and lust ( and in other inexplicable bonds, such as Kari and Angel’s), the suicides, the nudity, the 2mm.buzz cut all dare the prevalent rules to a conflict. Kari’s defiant- “Bring on the ladies”-after her haircut does appear as a war cry. She chooses her body as both the site and the ammunition for the conflict.

The conflict of the private space and the public sphere receives a special documentation in the novel. The individual remains historically a loner. With Kari, it is more chillingly so, since her sexual orientation challenges the norms. The collapse of communication with her parents is evident. The telephonic conversation with her mother ends in monosyllables and the only thing she specifically mentions of her father is his trite advice “ Don’t ever look lost, O.K.? And keep your ATM card in your pocket.” Kari’s ‘friends’ are aliens to her. Lazarus’ parting makes her a complete loner. Surprisingly, she wishes to celebrate it. And she does, with her weird hair cut that makes her look like Angel, now dead. Kari does not believe in those hypocritical assurances all is not lost. She knows that all is, at least, rotten. And those whop are not, like the family that feeds the stray cats, are chokingly marginalized. And she resists, alone.

The use of black and white and color is subtle throughout the novel. The drabness of the urban life, the faces ‘certain of certain certainties’ deserved the bland gray, while the colors went to the reveries, the epiphanies that help us to dream on in the void.

The ending resists normative closure. Kari dies and lives, like the archetypal resurrectionist. But this time in a PVC suit and not with the divine halo. And Ruth, with all the connotations associated with her name, “stirred in her sleep and smiled…” 

	Amruta Patil is a writer, sequential artist and art history fiend. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. She is the author of a graphic novel Kari published by HarperCollins. Currently she is working on 1999, a graphic novel based on a mytho-historical epic.You can read her writing at http://amrutapatil.blogspot.com. She is the managing editor of Mindfields.

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Reviewed by Saranya Sen Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee