It’s all blue and wet.
The world created by Athulya Pillai in her new comic book is on the brink of a disaster. Not one that devastates and leaves. But a persistent one. Like a routine.
‘Nanavu’ is about perennial tidal flooding that brings with it a constant feeling of wetness around you — home, walls, feet. You can never escape it.
It comes and goes every other week, and gets even worse during the rains. However, amid this wetness life goes on.
“That is what I first noticed when I visited Elankunnappuzha,” says Athulya.
It was during the KaBhoom cultural festival in Kochi last year that the 31-year-old illustrator visited the village, thanks to the efforts of Common Ground, a collaborative initiative, and Equinoct, a nonprofit that works in India’s coastal regions.
“People there were going about their lives, their pokkali fields and shrimp farms amidst the flooding. As if resigned to fate,” says Athulya.
“Some were also leaving behind their homes when things got too difficult and their houses were damaged beyond repair. But there was no solution.”
That’s when she wanted to tell the story of these common people through the eyes of a little girl.
“Though I am from Kochi, I never really saw such struggles just a road down. And when I witnessed it, I wanted to express it. That suffocation led to this comic — one without words, where images tell the whole story,” says Athulya.
In ‘Nanavu’, the nameless girl lives in a wet, blue world. A blue that represents the charm of Kerala’s waterbodies and, contrastingly, the hopelessness of people.
It is the tale of this girl and her sandals, which she keeps safe every day above a shelf, away from the water that comes calling at night.
She watches the normal around her — her father working on shrimp farms, going with her mother to the market, going to school, and the birds and fish around her. She notices everything even as it rains perpetually, even as it floods perpetually.
“That is her normal,” says Athulya, who took around seven months to finish the book. “It was difficult to first arrive at a story, and then create a new style of drawing appropriate for this story.”
The style is distinctive, different from her other books — Yondol and Eldo. Here, her story was not about wish fulfilment, like Yondol, or finding yourself, like Eldo. But it is about what happens when the sea enters your home, quite literally.
“These people see two sides of water — one that is giving and provides a livelihood, and one that takes away their home. They love it, they loathe it. They live with it.”