It’s probably the same daemon that inspires liars and rumour mongerers,” says Parismita Singh, when asked about what inspires her. “We’re all just telling stories.” With her, one gets the impression that the loose, amateur terms that she uses to describe her profession – ‘storyteller’ and ‘comic-book artist,’ instead of ‘graphic novelist’ or ‘illustrator’ – delimits the scope of her preoccupations. “To tell a really good story, I think that’s a decent enough goal to set oneself.” Those who went to St Stephen’s College with her still remember her as the gorgeous girl with the wicked sense of humour who peppered the yearbook with sharp, expressive doodles and caricatures of college life. Since then, the Assam-born artist and writer has had her work appear in the Sarai Reader and Tehelka, been shortlisted for a Little Magazine New Writing Award, and spent most of the last two years working on a graphic novel, The Hotel At The End Of The World, which releases this month from Penguin Books.

The Hotel At The End Of The World is extraordinary in its narrative and graphic style. As Pema Tsering serves up rice and pork curry to her travellers, their stories unravel one by one. We learn of Kona and Kuja stumbling on the trail to the Floating Island, a mythical land of plenty; of homesick Japanese soldiers in Manipur and the Naga hills during World War II; of Pema’s own story of lost love, and more. The comic-strip effect of her stark, inky lines underscores the complexity of the narrative as well as its range of influences, from Commando war comics to Buddhist art. “Style,” says the 29-year-old, “shapes stories, or gets distorted by them.” It’s a good time to be drawing books, “whether it’s a four-page photocopy comic or a bigger, more publicised graphic novel,” in her own words. Hotel... is likely to be one of those works that ensures this state of affairs continues.

Parismita Speak

After The Hotel At The End Of The World:
At the moment I’m working on an education research project in Kokrajhar, Assam. As for comics, there’s a project I’m working on for the Pao Collective.

Comic books or animated films?
They are two very different genres– like films and novels. I thought Persepolis was a good adaptation of a graphic novel – I don’t see it as an either/or question.

A novel or film already made that you’d like to adapt:
Etgar Keret’s very short pieces.

Words To Live By:
Words are not enough, you need images.

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