A GRAPHIC novel is dangerous business. Straddling the two continents of comic strips and novel, it can become either or neither. Neither is preferable because it is meant to be just that — much more than a work of illustrated fiction. The sketches are meant to say a lot about the geography, topography, yet leave a lot unsaid as well. And the printed word is to take you there, to that reading experience where the usual novel usually carries you through imagined space and time. Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel happily mixes these two essentials and bludgeons you, tickles you, even titillates you, both with the novelist’s and the artist’s tools. The author does create a defined landscape but then chooses to take off from that setting by sketching emotions, creating emoticons. It’s not his craftsmanship, his fluidity in dealing with this difficult genre that you need question at all. He is definitely a path-breaker. You have to give it to him. He is really good at it, this business of tying and untying the written word with the illustrations. What you start wondering after having read the book is whether he is wearing the same decades-old lenses to view the stereotypical Bengali — the divine, laudable loser — so open to the world around him, yet so closed; so adaptable, yet so rigid. Even reams of vernacular fiction, manufactured every Puja in Kolkata, almost deified this failed Bengali mascot in the late ’80s and the early ’90s. A direction-less Bhrigu fits in that role remarkably well. So does Jehangir Rangoonwalla or Digital Dutta. The characters stutter, fumble and travel nowhere. Which explains why all of them are so loosely connected, why you get to read about them only because they come over to Connaught Place. It is not meant to be a well-knit plot. One has the faint suspicion that D V D Murthy had to find a place in the novel to allow such interesting one-liners as ‘‘Death, the high cost of living’’, or ‘‘Universal death rate, one death per person’’. Similarly Shintu’s personality provides a peek into another of the stereotypical Bengali male’s anxieties — that which revolves around his performance on bed. But the degree of Banerjee’s familiarity with faces and contours that you get to see beyond Daryaganj in old Delhi is mind-blowing. His portrayal of Hakim Peshawari is simply unforgettable. Why the graphic novelist is neither into comic strips nor novel writing is fascinatingly exhibited wherever Banerjee discards words and just lets his sketches do the talking. For effect, check page 70 where the author says Bhrigu is living with Kali. There are a few colour strips that almost create the rustic calendar effect and add to the spoof value. In short, Banerjee takes you to a make-believe, mock-belief world dedicated to great lives going nowhere and orbiting a bookshop in the heart of Delhi. If you want a ride there, spend Rs 230. Statutory warning: Graphic novels are very, very fast reads.
