Why Absolute Jafar is Sarnath Banerjee’s most personal and tender graphic novel yet

Brighu walks the way some people drink: to metabolise what cannot otherwise be processed. His peripatetic method is also an epistemology. The city, for him, is not a place to be understood from above but accumulated underfoot through adjacency and accident rather than argument. What the walking body gathers over decades — the texture of a neighbourhood, the precise mood of a particular corner in a particular season — cannot be summarised or handed over. It can only be walked again. And this is where the novel’s central sorrow quietly announces itself: Jafar is, at his core, a Berliner. He will not walk these streets. He cannot receive what his father has spent a lifetime learning.

An illustration from Absolute Jafar

That Jafar cannot inherit Delhi is not incidental — it is, in large part, the state’s doing. The bureaucracy in Absolute Jafar is neither subplot nor comic relief, though it is frequently both. It is the structural antagonist: the force that made the family’s geography impossible before Jafar was even born. The immigration officer who greets Brighu and his wife, Mahrukh, on their return from Berlin — “Madam, you are Pakistani, your husband is Indian, your child is Indian but born in Berlin, and you live in Germany. Couldn’t you make it a little more complicated?” — is funny in the way that Kafka is funny: the joke lands, and then it settles. The documents required for an Indo-Pak marriage, the citizenship queries, the administrative bewilderment at a family that refuses to sort itself into clean national categories — these are not mere inconveniences. They are the mechanisms by which belonging is rationed and by which a child is already marked before he has had the chance to define himself.

Banerjee has always known how to make the state look ridiculous. What distinguishes Absolute Jafar is that the ridiculousness no longer feels like sufficient distance. The irony is still there: in the visual deadpan that places literal stag heads at a stag entry, that renders Jaisalmer House with the Phantom’s Skull Cave at its gate. Banerjee’s visual wordplay has always been his most distinctive instrument, a way of holding sentiment at arm’s length even as the image makes the sentiment unavoidable. But here the arm’s length keeps closing. The deadpan keeps cracking. Something is being admitted in this book that the earlier novels held carefully at bay.

This is what tarpan actually requires: not the serenity of release, but the difficulty of it. The ritual exists because the open palm does not come naturally. The hand wants to close around the water. And Absolute Jafar, in its careful silences, circling structure and compulsive walking, is a book whose hand keeps closing — on Delhi, on Kolkata, on a time that Banerjee knows is not coming back and cannot stop trying to give away. Only the graphic novel can place grief and irony in the same panel and let both survive.

Banerjee has been building this archive of two cities for two decades. Absolute Jafar is, so far, its most honest entry. It pretends to be a book about letting go. It sets out to let go. It does not quite manage it. In that failure, tender and precise, fond and faint, is everything: a book that holds on, quietly, for as long as it possibly can.