When Andreas Gefe begins his first morning in Delhi with a stroll through the dusty streets where he and his Swiss friends live, he doesn’t find ‘the much-cited colourfulness of India.’ Not until the blazing shop-signs and displays around central market tear away the opaque veil that seems to hide the city from his eyes, recounts Gefe in ‘The Mehandi Designers,’ a chapter included in ‘When Kulbhushan met Stöckli’ (www.harpercollins.co.in).
The compilation is an outcome of a collaborative project among comic book artists and authors from India and Switzerland, informs the intro by editor, Anindya Roy. “There was no brief given except this: Avoid the simple travelogue style where one takes a camel ride, has diarrhoea, then heatstroke, then gets pick-pocketed, or can’t buy a ticket from a machine, or takes the wrong tram, or suffers numbness because of the cold, or eats cheap sandwiches throughout the trip for the lack of money.”
Thus shunning the regular strand of travel documentation, the contributors were asked to look a layer deeper. What was the result? “Some felt taller… some disturbed… some couldn’t wait to re-visit… And some felt fine about the distance. At the end of it all, we got to know each other a little better,” Roy reports.
Returning to Gefe’s story, we find him visiting a ‘hatter,’ to see how makes a turban. “But all the turbans are already made. Waiting to be bought by one of the countless bridegrooms. Busy with the arrangements for their weddings. February is the wedding season here,” his notes read. “The artisan unwraps one of the turbans out of its plastic protection and hands it to me. I put it on my head and look at myself in the mirror. It reminds of carnival.”
Then, watching the mehandi designers, Gefe is fascinated by their craftsmanship. “The intimate communication between men and women I would never have expected in this place. And also by the fine and intricate lines of the patterns. So opposed to the improvisation in Indian everyday life or the chaotic bustle in the streets,” he narrates.
Engaging sketches.
