Kari and the River of Memories

Though the marshes, ponds and lagoon-lakes have vanished from the urban Indian cityscape, in deep cavernous spaces within the multiple minds of the archetypal Indian city, flows a strange river. The buildings seem to rise on it. But look closer, the silent river flows underneath. This silent river, that mystic river, is not Lethe, honey; and it’s not Mnemosyne either. This river feeds on memory; it plays with forgetfulness.

And this could have been anywhere, as the story goes, but this happens to be in ‘smog city’ Mumbai.

Often neglected in printspace, animals are ritually drowned in this river by archaic local cults, offerings of bags of plastic, faeces, refuse, unidentified corpses, electronic junk, friends and incomprehensive parents are offered to it, those which clog the arterial flow of this river; there are numerous tales of a traveller lost forever to time when she discovers the river in her lonely evening walks, or is carried by river spirits fascinated by her beauty.

Of the few strange people who’ve experienced the river’s stranger shores as essential to humans for survival, decline to speak of it; only someone with the innocence of an Orpheus, and with wounds impossible to heal, can summon up the courage to speak of it. But none dare to act boatman; the waters speak of unknown depths. And no one thinks of the traveller, one or many among the crowd, for the river just keeps rolling, along, with the share of individual and collective memories, washed away.

If the above appears garbled speech to you, better not read Amruta Patil’s Kari.
Yes, the graphic novel in India has finally come of age, even though the recognition is far from proper.

I had been waiting to read it, and after going through the reading, spent a month or two, after the initial hype was over, to summon up the courage to speak on it. Meanwhile, I have skimmed through blogs and other interesting places where they make reviews— I couldn’t find a proper reference to the river itself, which connects, rather interweaves the stories of Kari, Ruth, Angel, and others, into a complex narrative beyond metaphors.

In my reading, however, the river is central to the graphic novel; it is the silent protagonist, the boatman, the city, the memories of the city and other cities, and memories of memories. The characters’ lives are situated within and set by the river's boundaries, and like true magic, these lives weave solitude and melancholy into a beautiful completion which spreads out wings, contemplating a journey, better to say a return, to an impossibility where the strange river that feeds on memories empties itself in a desperate response to its slow painful drying, until the buildings and apartments sinks in it again at the end of the book, and in the surge of memories, the boatman becomes you.

If you haven't read Kari, you've really missed something...