Sarnath Banerjee’s Ajeeb Dastaan

Editor’s note: Home, identity, and belonging drive the narrative of Absolute Jafar, the smashing new graphic novel by Sarnath Banerjee. Brighu recounts his past in his bedtime stories to his son Jafar—who is born of fraught romance between an Indian and a Pakistani. He speaks of sultans and jinns, of street food and eccentric cousins, of Delhi, Calcutta and Karachi in the late ’90s and early 2000s, of borders and bureaucracy that cross the fortunes of lovers. 

In these stories, he brings up director Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s 1978 film, Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastaan, and walks us through its plot. Walking is a motif that runs through Absolute Jafar—Brighu himself is a perennial walker, seeking something more—and in the film’s protagonist and his aimless jaunts where life happens to him, Brighu finds parts of himself. This excerpt from Absolute Jafar by Sarnath Banerjee has been published with permission of Harper Collins India.

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This excerpt from Absolute Jafar by Sarnath Banerjee has been published with permission of Harper Collins India.