A Kashmiri Girl on a Cover

This is the cover for my picture book due in October 2019, published by Seagull Books. The cover illustration is done by me and the cover design by the awesome Sunandini Banerjee who designs all the Seagull Books covers. 

Here is Sunandini's response to me after sending me this cover design:

Thank you for the beautiful work you continue to do, and for having faith in me—for trusting me to add to your image on the cover. It has been a tremendous freedom and a responsibility and I am so very glad I could make you happy.

I am very touched to read this. While I am personally wary about emotion expressed over artwork, I have to admit that this time, when I saw my illustration placed within this understated and sophisticated cover design, I discreetly wiped away a tear. Who would've thought all those years and years of practice I put in would all lead to this?

This book was what I spent part of 2017 and most of 2018 frantically illustrating. To say that it was hard work would be an understatement. For an illustrator, making a picture book is akin to writing a novel. 

Here is a synopsis about the book ~

Priya Sebastian and Neha Singh, 'Is It the Same for You?'

‘The day they found my brother with a blood stain, I found one on my kurta too, but no one noticed my blood stain.’ Thus begins “Is it the same for you?” a story of a young girl in Kashmir as she goes through the turbulence of adolescence in her conflict-ridden world. While larger issues of terrorism, violence, and death engulf the hearts and minds of all those around her, she struggles to come to terms with her changing body and all that it entails. Left alone to deal with her constant questions, she experiences despair and loneliness but also shows resilience and hope in the faint knowledge that maybe it is not very different for all young girls around the world. : ‘Is it the same for you?’ she asks.
With powerful yet sensitive illustrations by Priya Sebastian, which infuse the story with universality, this beautiful volume is a tender attempt in imagining the different strands of a young life in Kashmir - a place where the inner conflicts of voiceless, adolescent girls are often overshadowed by the political, religious, and military conflicts that are now a constant in everyday life.

Forthcoming. October 2019.

Deep and Dark Drawings

Hello Every Sunday

"There is nothing more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of."

~ Toni Morrison

*

And sometimes you have to wait for new information inside yourself to be able to finish something, to find out how it should go.

~ Kiki Smith

Prejudices

An illustration I did towards the end of last year for The Indian Quarterly was for a story called The Circle, featuring the last of the Anglo Indians, the prejudices inherent in them and how it ultimately destroys them.
The print has turned out a bit darker than the original, so I am adding the complete original below along with a detail of the illustration.

The haunting story which makes us cringe at the extent of prejudice and perceived superiority that one community has for another reminds me of the remark made by a friend of mine after she had broken up with her Anglo-Indian fiancee. She said, "How long are these Anglo-Indians going to prefix "Anglo" to define themselves? They are Indians!" This is true of course, but try telling that to Anglo-Indians, you'd probably make them writhe in agony.

Once, some years ago, during coffee an Anglo Indian acquaintance of mine remarked that the father of her niece was a Malayalee. When I expressed surprise, my acquaintance hastily added, "But she (the niece) is not Malayalee! She is one of us! She is one of us!" I was perplexed at the absurdity of that remark and at the determination of my Anglo-Indian acquaintance to completely erase the Indian aspect from her family.

Some explanation for these mindsets can be found in William Dalrymple's The White Mughals and more briefly in City of Djinns.

Here are a couple of memorable quotes from City of Djinns -

'And they're a fascinating people, the Indians. I'll say that for them.'

I've always had friendly relations with them, mind. It's their country. That's what my father always used to say.'

'That's right. The Indians are a nice people. Provided you treat them as human beings.'

'You see we're not Britishers', said Mr Smith. 'We're something different.'

*

It's Raining Fish!

Happiest project I've ever done -

The Village

…he started to whisper. ‘It’s because all the images inside our heads have come from the world of ideas. That’s where we really belong, you know - not down here…where time snaps at everything we love.’

~ The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

A Village After Dark by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Pleasure of Posting.

So much pleasure in carefully packing these beautiful and 
sophisticated prints. Just look at them! 
Much to my delight, the entire Post Office was empty this afternoon so everything got stamped and sent in just 10 minutes flat.Those in Bangalore will be getting their prints by tomorrow itself via Speed Post. Woohoo!

Partition

The illustration above is one of three I was commissioned to do by the Commonwealth Writer’s website, Adda, to remember 70 years of violent, bloody Partition of the sub-continent. While I was given complete freedom to conceptualize the illustrations, it was suggested that I make all three with some kind of connecting thread to them. For this I used similar colors, red, black and white and a certain similarity to the landscape.

The illustration above is for a powerful story called ‘Regional Division’ by Sidra Zia. In the image, to depict division and violence I’ve used dramatic colors – red and black and torn paper; to show migration, I've poured the mayhem of million birds in the air, I've splattered red for bloodshed; I want the dramatic illustration to draw out all the emotions in the story.

The second illustration is for the non-fiction section, Speaking of Partition is a complex piece about communication; language and words in relation to Partition - whether what comprises a language is adequate enough to describe what happened during the Partition, the author is on a train journey, she talks about how the moment you board a train you can sometimes arrive at your destination.

The third piece shown below, is for a poem called That Part of Us.

More and more when I read such stories, when I hear Urvashi Butalia talk about her book, The Other Side of Silence, when I read Shashi Tharoor dismantling false constructions that we were (and still are taught in schools), I thank heavens for the power of stories that hold up the truth before our eyes.

On my desk

My favourite subject for a magazine spread.

Memory

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously…

—

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
(via mythologyofblue)

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all… feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique - all these are in the middle.

—

Paul Cezanne

Things I do

For Suttonese People -

Hers and His birthday cards.

Invisible People

This is my cover illustration for Harsh Mander's book of stories Invisible People. Stories of Courage and Hope. 
When I was reading through the manuscript, I could not help commenting to the publisher Anushka Ravishankar, how good the stories were and how absorbing to read. I also couldn't help remarking on the quality of the writing, it was excellent. The real-life heroes who make up these stories are truly people who have made their way out of the depths of despair and darkness and walked towards the light.
Do read what the author has to say at Duckbill's blog over here >

Adrenalin

At 2am on ordinary paper.

The Meal

This illustration wasn’t created to depict my hosts as a rhino and a bird, that would be far too simplistic an explanation. Instead, what I am trying to show in this picture is how much of a divergence into the strange my experiences in Montreal were for me, somewhat like stumbling into a forest full of unusual creatures and vegetation. Of course like most urban Indians who have traveled and are brought up on a diet of Western films, the settings of Montreal were familiar, however actually partaking in rituals within those settings made me sometimes feel like an aberration. I should have been outside watching this on screen.

Montrealers, at least all those kind and lovely people I met, went out of their way to introduce me to their culture. The question I was asked most often was: Do you like it? There was my friend B who looked at me anxiously while I partook my first artichoke, ‘do you like it?’, there was my loony Montreal flatmate who handed me Maple syrup poured into a spoon, ‘do you like it?’, there was The Mushroom Hunter who watched me cautiously try squeaking cheese and asked  ‘do you like it?’, my friend J gave me  green smoothie one morning and asked ‘do you like it?’, there was my kind proprio, benevolent as always, who handed me something, one of the many things she handed me while she asked ‘do you like it?’ Everyone showed me something, handed me something and always asked me anxiously, ‘do you like it?’ while I, new immigrant, utterly, totally overwhelmed and bewildered by it all, never knew what to say…

Fish Curry

Five Lessons from Travelling

Extra Large

I have a hundred thousand problems to deal with but right now it feels damn good to draw extra large once more.

Back to Work

"And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you’re going through family troubles, when you’re heartbroken, when you’re frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career."

~ Teresita Fernandez

*

On the last day of the world, I would plant a tree.

 ~ W.S. Merwin

                                           

Yearning          

When I am Back at my Desk

I can breathe easily once more

Pressure!

Sometime ago, a friend tried to take some pictures of me for an interview.We went out into my garden where he aimed the camera at me and said "pose" shortly after which it occurred to both of us that I had no idea how to pose so we went to my studio instead, where I  just did my thing while he clicked pictures. Here they are -

Some of the black and white pictures are dramatic, so please allow me to indulge myself and post these on my blog, because where else can I post them if not here?

When I first started drawing with charcoal, I remember that I posted the drawings on my old blog where a former teacher chanced by them and emailed me; 'these are the best drawings I've seen of yours so far.' he exclaimed much to my bewilderment, 'this is what you are all about! You can forget about drawing fairies and cute little bunny rabbits forever...' 

Sometimes I have been asked how I do what I do with charcoal, how I get all those strong lines and textures. I feel a hundred years old when I am asked that and I have been chided for fumbling for an answer during such moments. How can I ever put process into words? 

When you have reached a place in your life where you have it all, everything that you worked so hard for, you have only one thing left to do – dismantle everything that you love, give up everything that you hold close to your heart and begin all over again. So that new adventures and mysterious emotions will reflect over and over in your art and there will be progress in this one life that you have been blessed with. 

*

I sang because I knew that singing is testimony to the gratitude we owe God - but not because I knew how to sing. I was so deeply committed to this task right from the first note that the peals of derisive laughter that broke out had no more effect on me than a distant breeze in the eastern mountains...I was standing there through the power of things which were so high above me that I no longer mattered.

~ The Fish Can Sing

Halldor Laxness

Erm, many thanks to S for the photography.

Letter to a young artist