Truth About Cats

Kari takes you inside the skin of a certain kind of young womanhood in Indian cities 8212; the grubby mattresses and cigarette-smoke, balancing a casual debauchery with periodic phone calls to traditional families, the alcohol-sodden late nights and disapproving maids, watching Friends and falling out with each other, dealing with a gritty city and taking the first baby steps of careers. And the graphic novel form seems best suited to show the shards of this makeshift world. Comics theorist Scott McCloud says the gutter, the white space between panels, is one of most important narrative tools; they are the speaking silences that make disparate visuals cohere. In many ways, the graphic novel is the ideal way to convey the tangle of the lived moment without sacrificing the expressivity of the written word.

Kari is visually eclectic and allusive, including city maps and floor plans, photographic collages and misty watercolours, and sudden splotches of colour in a largely black and white palette. For all that, though, it8217;s the power of Patil8217;s writing that makes the novel remarkable. She can be lyrical in the Ruth interludes, watching the light play in her tea8217;s golden brew. She8217;s silly and irrepressible when she riffs on a colleague8217;s name Susan Lush 8212; lush with possibilities, Kari8217;s 8220;heart is an expanse of green grass at the thought of the name8221;.

It8217;s hard not to warm to Kari. The character bears a marked physical resemblance to her creator, though Patil has waved away any crude autobiographical correspondences. Either way, she8217;s a character who8217;s too good to be false 8212; with her sideways humour, her boyish braggadocio and vulnerability, and the dead-intense way she comes to things. She gives companionship to a dying woman, she observes the brutal poverty of Mumbai and her own arty voyeurism, the advertising industry fishbowl and the power-relations of her roommates8217; social world 8212; and yet, she says Ruth left her because she had no politics. 8220;Means, I have no Burning Issue. Blurring genderlines? Bigotry? Cultural genocide? Dying planet? I can8217;t pick. My favourite form of movement is 8216;float8217;. I stand for nothing. I espouse nothing but Ruth.8221; She also has many trite thoughts about the Mumbai monsoon and princesses trapped in snow globes, about crowded trains, about love and loss and appropriate endings.

There8217;s something unwittingly mock-heroic about Kari, in the way that all intense young people seem a bit absurd. But if you8217;ve never been one of those, the marvel of this book is how you really get to inhabit her angsty head for a while.

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