The Pig Flip review: An affecting tale of a Kerala man’s descent into gambling

A new graphic novel that I read recently reminded me strongly of these excellent books. The Pig Flip (HarperCollins India), written and drawn by Joshy Benedict and translated from the Malayalam by K.K. Muralidharan, is the deceptively simple story of one man’s gambling addiction and how it affects those closest to him. By the time you’re done with its just-under-120 pages, it becomes a much broader, weirder, affecting fable about self-loathing, paranoia and catharsis.

A family drama

Babycha, our protagonist, is hopelessly addicted to ‘spot flip’, the card game of choice in his village, which is a part of the Western Ghat foothills in Kerala. His wife, Paulikutty, is perennially anxious that her husband will overturn yet another rehabilitation attempt and return to his gambling den. His mother and his brother-in-law are similarly at the end of their tether.

Joshy draws the family drama scenes with a light touch, taking care not to overwhelm the reader with visual detail — besides, we are seeing all of this through Babycha’s point-of-view and he isn’t the most attentive son or husband or brother-in-law. Conversely, the gambling scenes are rendered dreamily, the fervour of the gambling men bright amidst the beautiful, vaguely dangerous greenery all around them.

As these two narrative strands — Babychan’s private and family life, respectively — collide in the second half of the story, Joshy the artist kicks things into top gear. The final 20-odd pages are drawn in an almost hallucinogenic style, as we see Babycha’s sanity levels dropping and his worst weaknesses rise to the surface.

The reason I mention this subtle shift in visual style is simple: the formal rules are different for comics. In a prose novel, a narrator can get more or less effusive depending upon the second-half trajectory of the plot. In a graphic novel, however, one cannot simply unleash a verbal torrent after building up a slow, careful economy-of-words through much of the book. Therefore, it’s largely up to the art to create that sense of narrative escalation.

A sense of disgust at domestic life

The difficulty level I’m talking about is easily demonstrated with a two-page spread in the book, pages 20 and 21, a flashback that shows us how Babycha came to marry Paulikutty. Across these two pages, the following text (100-odd words) is split across several panels; I have inserted the word ‘break’ below in all-caps every time a new panel begins on the page.

“When I broke it to my family that I wanted to marry Paulikutty, Mom had been dead against it. Only if I stopped the damned gambling would she agree to the marriage, she had declared aloud. BREAK. And nobody objected to that BREAK. Dad was around, then. BREAK. He always blamed Mom for raising me as a spoilt kid. BREAK This was an occasion for her to defend herself. Dad had sternly told Mom and my four sisters that he didn’t want to hear a thing about me and my affairs. For him, I was the sort who belonged in a pigsty, and he had no interest in marrying me off only to get dragged into endless altercations with the girl’s family.”

First off, this is good, crisp writing that gives us a succinct idea of the dynamics between Babycha’s parents, as well as the origins of how/why his mother is so paranoid about the prospect of Babycha slipping into a gambling spiral again. The father’s comment about pigsties ties in with the central image of the novel, that of Babycha being nauseated by the smell of a pig farm. The stench itself isn’t meant to be taken literally, for it signifies Babycha’s sense of disgust at a ‘regular’, unremarkable domestic life.

The illustration style, lighting et cetera are intensely cinematic in this passage (albeit in a more muted colour palette compared to the rest of the book; this is a flashback after all). When the text tells us “Dad was around, then” we are shown his father’s empty lounge chair and as the text begins to quote the father more explicitly, the illustrations ‘focus’ more and more intensely upon the late man’s face, like an extreme closeup of a Stanley Kubrick character.

A handsomely produced book

Translation introduces a new variable and adds to the degree of difficulty. The translation in a comics spread like this has to be agile and malleable. You have to make word-choices based on things like panel length and the surface area of the page covered by the ‘speech balloons’. If you notice, in the para above, the last stretch of text is much longer than all the others. Here, the eye is being guided downwards by a near-vertical panel and so the ‘coverage area’ is much larger. At the end of the passage, we are given the clearest view yet of Babychan’s late father; still delivering the final word on his son, this time from the afterlife.

All of which is to say that the technical finesse on display here is quite impressive. The translator, K.K. Muralidharan, is a production designer and graphic artist himself, and this no doubt helped him deliver the delicate synergy of (translated) text and image that The Pig Flip required. I usually do not comment upon the price of a book I’m reviewing, but an exception should be made here because Rs 499 is an impressively low/competitive price point for a 120-page, full-colour graphic novel in India, a handsomely produced 9-by-6-inches book at that. The price of paper, especially the better-than-usual paper graphic novels demand, has risen significantly since the pandemic and high MRPs have been an industrywide challenge since 2020, at least.

The Pig Flip is highly recommended for all readers, really, but especially those who appreciate the formal uniqueness of comics/graphic novels.