An unknown Indian twenty-something was striving for high art in the world of graphic novels, and managing to get there with appreciable aplomb.

Unlikely realisation flooded my consciousness: This was the most painterly achievement I’d seen in the genre, anywhere in the world. In my lifetime of die-hard commitment to comic books, graphic novels and bandes dessinées (all three are essentially the same thing), I’d never encountered anything like Kari’s knowing jump cuts between visual styles, interspersed with tributes to iconic works from artists like Andrew Wyeth, Leonardo da Vinci and Frida Kahlo. One of those who immediately grasped the book’s importance was the novelist Neel Mukherjee, whose review in Biblio made the perceptive comparison to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home – one of the greatest graphic novels – writing, “I find Patil’s graphics more evocative, more beautiful than Bechdel’s and her prose, although marred very occasionally by a tendency towards a posturing colloquial hipness, also a thing of radiant beauty: witty, smart and swaggering, brightly knowing without ever falling into archness, illuminated by frequent flashes of poetry.” This meant it was launched with barely a ripple, and took many years to accumulate the cult status it enjoys now. Kari was sui generis, which at that time put it far beyond the ken of mainstream readers and reviewers.

“On a slightly unconnected note, I am sorry to report that babies, as a collective species, are largely oblivious to my charms.All Patil had was her slim, highly individualistic book, with its spiky-haired protagonist on its glossy scarlet cover, that sparkled with cheeky visual quotations and unexpectedly profound insights into the psychological landscape of a heartbroken – but healing – queer young protagonist.

Makes you trust a stranger with your life, your car keys, your best-guarded secret.” Brings the truth out of a woman sooner than any confession box does.

“She wasn't my kind of woman and that's why, that night she was.

Necessarily, you must be defensive about being a settling sort of girl.” The ones who look as settled as old housedogs want to twist their way into flying. The ones who seem to have it in them to be flyers are the ones who want to snuggle into settling.

“There are settling girls, and there are unsettling girls.

After that everything is a matter of time and incident.”

“Whatever love laws have to be broken, the first few seconds suffice.

“In a faraway city where the palette was pure and bright, Ruth stirred in her sleep, and smiled”.

Fear of heights is fear of a desire to jump.”

“I guess everyone has a bird urge when they look down heights, a desire to jump, without wing or buoyant sail.

Amruta patil books