Between Berlin, Karachi, and College Street: Sarnath Banerjee maps life in graphic lines

Sarnath Banerjee doesn’t speak in straight lines - he drifts, loops back, detours into cricket metaphors, Japanese art, Berlin loneliness, and Karachi folklore, often within the same breath. In conversation with Malavika Banerjee in the city, the graphic novelist turned the evening into a journey across time zones and emotional landscapes, where stories weren’t just told but collected, archived, and gently teased into existence, even as rounds of Darjeeling tea steamed on the tables and a savoury-to-dessert spread of small bites quietly made its way through the room, grounding the drifting ideas in warmth, aroma and taste.The beauty of “rich loneliness”Loneliness as a landscape was one of the evening’s most lingering ideas, as Sarnath Banerjee spoke of “a silence that you would find in College Street after the last office‑goer has gone to the Chinese restaurant and had his drink and the pavements are still warm with footsteps of office‑goers and sellers of books and vendors,” when you walk into the drama hall and “see this amazing, very pregnant, very articulate, very beautiful loneliness carved out of a place that was full of hubbub,” a “rich loneliness” that, “for Bengali men especially,” is bound up with dhoopur, those afternoons “when you do your schooling, your thinking, your literature,” even as he insisted, “I don’t have any interest in nostalgia, I’ve lived through that world and I’ve done , and should,” and “my son is not going to be like me, it is his hormonal duty to rebel against his father,” so any attempt to bring that old College Street back, he warned, risks becoming nothing more than “a cheap simulacra.”“An Indo-Pak marriage is like a lifelong problem”At the heart of the book lies Banerjee’s own cross-border love story, something the moderator jokingly called “a popular new disease, a lifelong problem,” which Banerjee embraced as he confessed, “I had zero chance in Delhi. My reputation was ruined. Then I found an unsuspecting Pakistani woman who in a moment of affection said, ‘You look like my sister.’ That was my moment,” adding dryly that his mother “did not take that very kindly.” The marriage, he said, brought a whirl of cities, cultures, relatives and contradictions, and eventually a son whose tales entered the book ,“The boy’s stories are so good,” Banerjee laughed, recalling how “he wants a salary. He was nine years old. First he said 60 cents. Then 50. Then 30. Finally we agreed.” Even as he joked about doing “TED Talks on how to prevent Indians and Pakistanis from getting married,” he admitted the journey pushed him through layers of stereotype into everyday discovery: “You find the jokes, the food, the eccentric relatives, and all of that comes through the stories the father tells his son, the jinn stories.”“I don’t draw what I see, I draw from memory”Despite his archival approach, Banerjee is quick to clarify that he isn’t nostalgic in the conventional sense. He collects fragments of life - cassettes, paper punches, everyday objects, but these are tools for “historicizing emotion, how we felt at a particular time.” Comics, he believes, are uniquely suited to this task: they allow the second imagination to flourish, capturing both the seen and the unseen. Even his mother’s critiques of his abilities became part of this archive. “She would say, ‘He can’t even draw like he should.’ But that friction shaped my work,” he laughed. The interplay between text and image, he argued, mirrors life itself: two people may interact, disagree, or act independently, yet the landscape and story continue to evolve on their own logic.“My mother was convinced I couldn’t do either words or pictures properly. She thought I was just doing some clever sleight of hand- decorating things instead of really drawing. It took years to explain to her that comics work in silences as much as in lines”- Sarnath Banerjee