Nandita Basu’s graphic novel ‘The Piano’ is an unusual story of a woman’s friendship with music
An artisanal piano made in 1912 in Germany travels through time, encountering World War One and the Indian freedom struggle before reaching the home of Meera, a young girl searching for a friend in Calcutta in 1992. “As I was searching for my friend, my friend was searching for me,” Meera observes.
That friend turns out to be Marcus Aurelius, the actual 106-year-old German piano belonging to Nandita Basu, which inspired her new graphic novel The Piano. It tracks how Meera, modelled on Basu herself, comes to find Marcus Aurelius as a kid, loses it, and then discovers it again as an adult.
Basu is a Gurgaon-based musician and visual artist, who has been producing comics for around 10 years. She has earlier produced short comics for comic book anthologies, drawn and written a syndicated comic series for the Tamil newspaper Dinamalar, and self-published an autobiographical graphic novel, A Comic Existense.
The Piano is Basu’s first graphic novel formally published by a leading publication house, Penguin Random House’s imprint, Duckbill. For Basu, who says she “likes solitude” and “doesn’t have too many friends”, The Piano emerged from her wanting to write a story about friendship.
“I did not just want to highlight a piano,” Basu told Scroll.in. “I thought why can’t friendship be one’s...
from Scroll.in https://ift.tt/2G3OnGY
Comments
Post a Comment
thank you for visiting our website follow us for more news and updates