29 March,2026 09:22 AM IST | Mumbai | Debjani Paul
Absolute Jafar is filled with heartwarming moments between the protagonist Bhrigu, and his son, the eponymous Jafar. This particular panel is a sweet recollections of lazy Sunday mornings when his son snoozes . Pics Courtesy/Sarnath Banerjee
When we connect to Sarnath Banerjee over video call, it's on the second day of his return to Berlin following a "hectic" two-month visit to India, during which he launched his new graphic novel, Absolute Jafar (HarperCollins Publishers India, Rs 799). The house is quiet as he takes us to his kitchen where he brews tea, then to his drawing desk, where a solitary lamp comes to life as daylight melts into twilight.
The silence is a conscious choice as Banerjee "recalibrates the pace of life", the very embodiment of what it means to be an immigrant, straddling two very different worlds.
Absolute Jafar, in that sense, is one of his most personal books, a meditation on migration and belonging. The vehicle for this tale? Walking. Almost semi-autobiographical, the book follows Banerjee's alter ego, Bhrigu, an "all-weather walker", as he treads through Delhi's streets and parties, where he falls in love with a Pakistani artist. This cross-border romance - and all the bureaucratic difficulties it comes with - takes the couple to Berlin, where they have a son, the eponymous Jafar. It is at this point that we realise this book is Bhrigu walking his son through his memories of a fading home, one that the teenage Berliner can barely relate to.
At its heart, Absolute Jafar is also a tale of father-son love. This love fills the otherwise black-and-white pages with colour every time Jafar makes an appearance. It also tints Banerjee's voice with affection when he talks about his son, Mir Ali. "He's 13 but 5' 11". He looks a bit scary; he's a bit like a Husky in terms of looks, but more like a Great Dane in temperament," says the author.
"I have great hope for his generation," he continues, "Gen Alpha is kind, large-hearted, and gutsy. They have a strong sense of justice and a straight spine; they go for all protests against Israel. They also read more and anti-technology. I guess somewhere Millennial and Gen X parents got it right."
Banerjee, who co-parents Mir Ali with his former wife, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, speaks about his bond with the teenager: "Co-parenting a child across two households creates a different kind of bond because you spend so much one-on-one time. Even when we go on holidays, it's almost romantic as his father's world unfurls in Calcutta and his mother's in Karachi. It's a privilege to relearn the world through the eyes of a child growing up with so many specificities together."
You can see that in the book too, as Bhrigu sees the future through Jafar's lens, and tries to show his son the past through his own eyes.
There's a hilarious exchange between father and son in the book, when the boy asks for a "salary" for all ideas his father borrows from him; it immediately takes us back to a similar childhood conversation with our parents.
Animals are another recurring motif through the book. One of its most striking metaphors for the sense of displacement that comes with migration is a sketch of a cheetah, standing alone in the wilderness after being flown in from Namibia. The sketch is titled "The Last Migrant". "I read about the cheetahs that were reintroduced to Kuno [National Park, in Madhya Pradesh]. I thought of this lone cheetah in the middle of this alien landscape, in this dying sunlight," says Banerjee, "It probably has a kidney that's not functioning because it's in an alien world. It's so lonely, it could move one to tears."
When Banerjee first moved to Berlin more than a decade ago, "I hated it". "I lost friends because I used to constantly complain. I would keep looking at the weather report for Delhi, and would go back every chance I got."
But over time, Berlin came to be home, most markedly as the city where his son was born and grew up. Despite that, anxieties over migration persist.
It's not an easy time to be a migrant; xenophobia and the far-right wave sweeping the globe has made even erstwhile welcoming nations harder to belong in. "You have to deal with hostile governments and bureaucracy. People can be kicked out at any time," says Banerjee, "But Germany also took in fleeing Syrians when nobody else wanted to. It's a grumpy city, but in its own way, it allowed people in."
Berlin is also the city "where Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians can fight, joke, fall in love with each other. It's my idea of a good world. Here, your local nationalism falls to the side as you realise that Pakistanis or Egyptians or Mexicans or Peruvians are all âdesi', they are all brown like you and me."
"The strength of European cities is that they can accommodate so many different nationalities," he says. And yet, the West has very little "critical imagination" when it comes to the world outside their borders, he adds. "I don't think people can fundamentally imagine what it is like to experience the insecurity of being a little girl leaving her home because of a siren, not knowing if it will still be there when she returns."
During a talk in Berlin in 2025, he referred to this as the "Critical Imagination Deficit", giving the example of how protective Germans are of their children at the playground, and are yet unable to rouse the same emotion for a child elsewhere. "India, too, suffers a lack of imagination when it comes to class, he says. "If you're someone from the upper class or savarna caste, you don't actually have an imagination of what it is like to face water apartheid."
The concept is at the centre of his next exhibition in Mumbai. In addition, he is working on a satirical cultural glossary for Absolute Jafar that will go in print for European audiences, and eventually be turned into an exhibit as well.
