Review: Still Life by Anoushka Khan
A meditative graphic novel about an introverted young woman who sets out to find her missing husband
Still Life by UK-based artist and editor Anoushka Khan, who grew up in Pakistan and the Netherlands, is an interesting exercise in using words and black and white images to weave a curiously poignant story. The graphic novel, which won the Best Illustrated Book title in the Publishing Next Industry Awards 2021, features Pinky, who is waiting for her husband Pasha, who has been missing for a week, to return home. As she waits for him, she notices patterns in the faces of people, in the hills and in everything around her. Through sleepless nights, she hallucinates visions of Pasha’s lifeless body with blood pouring out, sinking into the black sand. A loner who barely leaves her home, she is forced to step out in search of Pasha. As she moves through the town, the reader begins to travel with her and her innermost thoughts and feelings.
Pinky visits Pasha’s cigarette shop and his tailor for clues. Along the way, she returns to her childhood, and to the house in the quaint old town where she was raised. As it is with most toddlers, her memories of her parents from that time are linked mostly to their smells, sounds and touch. Her father was an archaeologist who told her about the Indus Valley Civilisation and dreamt of finding a forgotten city. Her mother was a doctor, who told her about the tree of life. “You might think we’re so different from other creatures on earth, but we’re not,” she said.
A sickly child, Pinky spent weeks in bed. She remembers a lizard on the wall from those times, and felt sorry for it — trapped inside as it was, just like her. On a particularly feverish day, she imagined her lizard become many all at once, dancing in front of her. She recalls another incident from her early years when she witnessed the killing of an animal in a bazaar for the first time. The image made her sense that violence flowed under all of us like a river. “I thought how thin the veil between living and dying was, like gauze you could see a wound through,” she ponders.
In the old town, she meets her grandmother and has dinner with her family —who secretly hope that she is finally coming home to them. On further probing, she finds out that Pasha had gone to stay at a guest house in the mountains for a few days. She decides to go there, and her family accompanies her. When they reach the countryside, Pasha’s mother joins them from her village. Due to a big storm, they all stay overnight at the village.
During the course of her journey, Pinky also rummages through many old memories of Pasha. When Pasha lost his first tooth, he showed it to Pinky who put it in a matchbox along with her own fallen teeth. When they were eight, Pinky taught Pasha to play chess in the courtyard. They would draw comics, watch Knight Rider and go up on the roof of the house with her uncle’s binoculars. Pasha then went far away to school. When she met him again after nine years, he was shy and awkward, and had a new seriousness about him. She spent the next six years hiding that she was in love with him.
As they drive towards the mountains, Pinky is reminded of another disturbing recollection from her younger days when there were some killings in the city. When she talks to her father about it, he tells her that there is a dignity in death, and even decay is beautiful. “Life is so precious and so not precious. How can it be? But it is,” he wonders aloud. Pinky’s mother adds that one cannot answer all the questions, and not understanding is only human. “Death is the eternal moment. We live for so short and then we’re dead forever,” she says.
The reader deduces that Pasha is the more adventurous of the two. He was restless even as a child, and missed the fields and hills of his village. He had wanted to climb a hill with Pinky someday from where they would be able to see the town below, but she is scared to go there. Ironically, when Pasha goes missing, Pinky is forced to become fearless and do all the things that she would never have otherwise chosen to do. In a sense, the quest for Pasha becomes a kind of inner journey of self-discovery for her, taking her back into her past and connecting it with her present moment.
Reading this slim 100-page book is rather meditative. Khan’s evocative black and white sketches on each page brings out the emotional sense of a place and of the people who inhabit it. The text, though minimal, is deliberate and meaningful — and there is much to infer between the silences.
A freelance writer who lives in New Delhi, Neha Kirpal writes primarily on books, music, films, theatre and travel
The views expressed are personal