The Hotel At The End Of The World;
By Parismita Singh; Penguin India
Pages: 138; Rs 350
Buy Borrow Avoid
Imagine travellers walking up to a restaurant in an obscure place in search of food and refuge from rains. Imagine them narrating stories involving their escapades. Each one’s story is more complex and intriguing than the other. Stories ranging from that of one half blind man and his legless friend going right up to China to that involving the Japanese soldiers from World War II getting homesick seeing snow flakes – all interwoven in a narrative that’s accompanied with sketched out visuals. That’s a comic for adults! Oops…no! Calling such work a ‘comic’ is so politically incorrect. It’s a graphic novel.
Ever since Penguin India brought out Corridor by Sarnath Banarjee some fours years ago — a new genre of writing under this ‘happening and modern’ category of ‘graphic novel’ has started to evolve. The latest offering from Penguin under the genre is Parismita Singh’s The Hotel At The End Of The World.
The book is set in a restaurant somewhere up in the hills and obliviously close to the China border (so that’s the end of the world for you!). This is where the spirits of Japanese solders from World War II still come for a walk and ordinary folks are looking around for a floating island. Every character has a story to narrate though some do it reluctantly and some need a little prodding.
The stories do not end on a happy note yet they need to be told as if they have been restlessly idling away in the author’s brain. Take this story of Pema, the girl at the restaurant, whose father is a night walker. He leaves his body sleeping while he goes around gathering — of all things — souls for the god of death. One night he is sighted by Pema’s lover and that stirs up the poor chap so much that he aborts her! These stories do not necessarily enchant or engage but there is something about the manner in which they unfold. They hold on to you till you get to the end. It is like your favourite grand old aunt telling you tales in that rich Indian tradition of constructing stories while downloading them verbally. If they make sense consider yourself lucky and if they don’t just let them die on you. That’s traditional oral story-telling for you. That Parismita Singh would attempt to replicate this in The Hotel At The End Of The World is being very bold especially when you learn that she is all of 29 years of age and this is her debut book.
If this happens to be your first graphic novel you just might land up categorising it as a collection of folklores with a post-modern look. After going through the book you feel good that such books are not called ‘comics’ for the visuals in comics were certainly more pleasing or gripping or both (Commando comics included!). The ones in this book are at times disoriented and have a continuity break if one could borrow that term from cinema. The narrative is good (though not consistently) and stories such as that of Pema shows glimpses of a writer who knows her craft. This may be Parishmita Singh’s first book but is certainly not her last. One only hopes that she gets to writing without bothering too much about creating visuals for her writing is certainly meritorious and will be more palatable without the accompanying work of art.
Book Reviews 
The Hotel At The End Of The World;
The book is set in a restaurant somewhere up in the hills and obliviously close to the China border (so that’s the end of the world for you!). This is where the spirits of Japanese solders from World War II still come for a walk and ordinary folks are looking around for a floating island. Every character has a story to narrate though some do it reluctantly and some need a little prodding. 
