A drink with BS: Graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee is in search of audience

Banerjee tells Uttaran Das Gupta that since he cannot write about identity politics or motivational subjects, few seem interested in what he wants to say

Imagine taking the underground from Tegel, Berlin’s international airport, on a wintry evening, and sitting opposite a stranger, trying to decipher his thoughts. Suddenly, the unimaginable happens: The stranger reads yours. “Within the normalness of the urban landscape, something changes very slightly — always in the area of fear,” says graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee. “The German word unheimlich means “unhomely”. It is a synonym for uncanny. In a typical German manner, it suggests that the nest of the uncanny is in the most normal circumstances.” For Banerjee, cities, especially those with a dark past, have a phantom city beneath them,