It146;s the Detail

8216;I can8217;t abide mythology, unless it is urban, contemporary mythology. Like the man who sits for hours and hours in Connaught Place and knows it like the back of his hand8217;7

What is your new graphic novel, The Barn Owl8217;s Wondrous Capers about?
The Barn Owl8217;s8230; Penguin, Rs 395 is set in 18th century Calcutta, with its drunken religiosity and excessive eccentricity and wealth. It is replete with a mystery and intrigue and a sense of history. That history is not the history of textbooks. It is pedestrian history, history of the streets. Like how did a carriage of that era appear or what did the pankhawallas talk about. It may be literary, but there is a perverted magic to it, as it can slip into fantasy at any time.

The city is an important metaphor in your work. Corridor was set in Delhi and now Barn Owl8217;s8230; is set in Calcutta.
I8217;m a fan of Ibn Battuta, who moved from city to city, almost as if to prove that his native city in Morocco was the best. For me, Calcutta is the city. But I8217;ve always been fascinated by all the cities I8217;ve lived in. I8217;m interested in getting to the psychic core of the city and also how living in a city is almost a conspiracy. I love highlighting its vanishing races. Like the plumbers in Delhi or the electricians and telephone cleaners in Calcutta. You stumble upon them unexpectedly, yet they are vanishing, as society becomes homogenous.

Why is it said that the graphic novels is the narrative form of the future?
That8217;s because everybody is looking for an engaging reading experience. People are wary of thick literary books. Stories that are being told now and the ones that will be told in the future will be very incident-oriented.

A lot of labour goes into this form.
It8217;s back-breaking work, not recommended as a career choice to everyone, unless you feel compelled to continue telling comics. Firstly, there is a lot of research that goes into it. It8217;s a game of details. For example, for Barn Owls8230; I would sit at the library in London for hours, researching how an 18th century pistol looked at the time. After the research, comes the storyboard stage, where one sits and manually draws everything and I do not like to use the computer till the last stage. So that means even more work.

Your first novel Corridor in 2004 was hailed as the first graphic novel in the country. How much has the genre developed in India?
There8217;s definitely more interest in the form. More people are getting into it and they are looking at their neighbourhood, or documenting the city as slice of life. But it hasn8217;t reached the publishing level yet.

What is it that makes comics so 8220;high maintenance8221;?
Comics have their own grammar, syntax and inherent logic. You can8217;t write that a man is jumping off the bus and show the same in the image. There has to be something more. There has to be a tension between the words and the image. As a graphic novelist, you try to create atmosphere, a psychological state and a sense of drama.

You8217;d said mythological stories like Hanuman and Mahabharata need to be banned in our country as they do not let newer stories come out.
I think there is a need to tell contemporary stories in contemporary voices, that is, is you are writing for your readers here. The West, unfortunately is still exotica-oriented. They expect stories from India to still have goddesses and bindis and pickles. Personally, I can8217;t abide mythology, unless it is urban, contemporary mythology. Like the seller of aphrodisiac in Old Delhi, or the man who sits for hours and hours in Connaught Place and knows it like the back of his hand.