Double Talk by Manjula Padmanabhan

Double Talk debuted in the Sunday Observer in Bombay, 1982. Suki, its central character, was a bushy-haired, baggy-clothed free spirit. With neither job nor family to tie her down, her life was breezily uncluttered, unencumbered and unconventional. In four years she had just one romance and her best friends were non-human. Her favourite concerns were bewilderingly abstract and her reference points were usually universal rather than local. In the nineties, Suki was resurrected in a daily strip of that name, in the Pioneer in New Delhi, where it ran for six years. Despite all the changes that have occurred in the real world since the birth of Suki, the character and the illustrations continue to bristle with their own quirky brand of humour. Or lack of it: Bombays feisty readers had strong views about the cartoon, and sent in almost 60 published letters of complaint to the editor!

This book represents a selection of the strips that appeared in print from 1982 to 1986.