Alison Stewart: Welcome back to All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. To end our show today, we're going to be talking about This Beautiful, Ridiculous City. That's the name of a new graphic memoir about the author's coming to New York story. From an intergenerational family home just outside of Calcutta. Kay Sohini was educated at English speaking schools. She read about New York and it made her fall in love with the city before she ever stepped foot in the Big Apple. She was especially entranced by its literary history.

Sohini quotes E.B. White on the first page saying, "In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation, a shift in weather perhaps, or something arriving in the mail, but in New York, the chances are endless." A writer, researcher and artist, Sohini writes with what belonging means in a city full of people who come from everywhere and how the post colonial arc of India's history has shaped her journey. Kay Sohini, welcome All Of It.

Kay Sohini: Hi. So glad to be here.

Alison Stewart: So glad to have you. I think I pronounced your last Sohini.

Kay Sohini: It's Sohini, yes.

Alison Stewart: Thank you. I'm sorry about that.

Kay Sohini: No problem.

Alison Stewart: Sohini. How did literature come to be the catalyst for your move to New York?

Kay Sohini: I feel like I've just been shaped by all these popular culture and classic literature stuff that I just grew up reading and watching. I was an introvert. I still am. I still very much am an introvert. I spent a lot of time reading and in libraries. My dad had this dusty-- it's not a library, but it's this dusty old room where he had all these books, mostly secondhand copies from College Street. I spent a lot of time in that room and, I don't know, dreamed of the world, I guess. That's where it started.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, if you are one of the millions of New Yorkers who came here from somewhere else, we want to hear what it is about that called you to this beautiful, ridiculous city and what made you feel like you belong here. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can join us on the air or you can reach us via text, 212-433-WNYC. What brought you to this beautiful, ridiculous city? You say in the book, in the thank-yous that you drew for 12 hours a day for nearly six months. Did you know what you wanted to draw, or did it come to you daily?

Kay Sohini: The way comics work is usually you have to-- there's thumbnailing, and there's penciling, inking, and then coloring. Usually there are different themes for that, but when you do graphic novels, mostly, one person does it. I came from academia. I don't have a background in comics. I just started drawing one day because my mentor did, and I was inspired by it.

I didn't go the traditional route. I couldn't find a way to have the entire book drawn out ahead of time and then run it by my editor or anything like that. What I did was I took it literally one page at a time. I would literally sketch and pencil one page. My goal was just this one thing. I didn't want the images to repeat what the word said already, because in that case, I may as well write prose, but I was trying to make a comic. I was like, "The illustrations have to mean as much as the words." That's how I drew my pages and tried to make my compositions.

Alison Stewart: There are many pull quotes, and one is from James Baldwin early on in the book. He wrote, "I should say it was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive." How does that relate to you?

Kay Sohini: I grew up reading stuff like Asterix and Tintin. That was just fun comics. I didn't really think much of it till I encountered Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. That was I think, where it all started, because her story, it's a very messy story, as we all know. Obviously it wasn't similar to mine, but I came from a family where it was very dysfunctional, just like hers. There was a death, which was very messy, which I only allude to in the book because I didn't know yet how to write about it. That's for my next book.

When I read it, I felt not so alone. It's such a weird thing to say because I was just this girl in India and she was in New York, and we didn't have anything in common, but she made me feel like I was not alone in this world.

Alison Stewart: She's in the book, too.

Kay Sohini: She's in the book. She's on the cover too.

Alison Stewart: You said that it made you not feel as alone.

Kay Sohini: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Kay Sohini: That's a really great question. I guess I never really thought about it. It just made me realize that, when we are depressed, we think that literally nobody else can understand us, but sometimes books can. That's all I can really say about it. It's a little ineffable, I think.

Alison Stewart: Kay Sohini is a comic artist, researcher and writer. Her new book is called This Beautiful, Ridiculous City. An important part of your story starts with some of the changes in Indian culture, especially during '90s. Growing up How did you understand how cultural changes in India shaped your home life?

Kay Sohini: I might be inaccurate because it's been a while, but growing up it really felt like the change was overnight. One moment I remember having this black and white CRT TV which only had state-run channels, and then the very next day we had cable tv and then the single theater cinemas turned into multiplexes. There were, I don't know, American cars and American movies, and all of these things happening almost overnight.

There was certainly a lot of American literature in College Street too, which I then grew up reading. It almost shaped my dreams and desires when I wasn't even looking. I wasn't consciously thinking about it. Only upon coming here and realizing that I don't feel a culture shock was I like, "Wait, why don't I?" That way, I guess.

Alison Stewart: There's a chapter in the book called Clementines, "because in Bengali, we do not say, 'I love you.'" What do you remember about your family? About the role of food in your family?

Kay Sohini: I am serious about that. In Bengali we do not say, "I love you." There is a literal translation, but I do not remember. My parents love me very much. They just never say it. When they do want to say it they feed me. I am quite literal about that. Like I said, my family when we were growing up, it had just suffered this terrible tragedy. Somebody we know and love, my mother's sister, she died. It just made a lot of us emotionally dysfunctional. Bengalis don't do therapy either. They do now, but back then they didn't.

Alison Stewart: Oh no.

Kay Sohini: A lot of our comfort was literally from gathering around food.

Alison Stewart: Well, this page alone shows me all of the different food in your family. Would you tell people a little bit about this page?

Kay Sohini: Oh my God, yes. There's this one story that I didn't want to mention is that page features this Bengali dessert called payesh, and it's essentially a rice pudding. It's supposed to be this auspicious food, kind of thing. When I was leaving for the U.S., my grandmother, she made this, a huge pot of payesh, and she wanted me to take just a container of it with me. I was like, "Didu, there's no way I can take this because this is liquid, and liquids are not allowed." She was like, "It's auspicious. Tell them that your grandmother sent it." I was like, "They will not understand that."

She was a very emotional lady. She loved me very, very much. I actually had to take her to the airport. I just had to eat before I went through the gates, because I knew I wouldn't be able to throw it away, that would have broken my heart.

Alison Stewart: That's sweet. The way you write about New York City and what it has to offer you is this sense of possibility. It was a dream of your parents in a way that you would be ready for whatever the next thing was, whatever it was going to be, because they lived in a certain place and they were trying to expand your horizons.

Kay Sohini: Sorry, what was that?

Alison Stewart: I'm just saying, why do you think you gravitated towards a city rather than from a less chaotic way of life?

Kay Sohini: You have to understand that the small town I grew up in, it was incredibly small to the extent where it was actually claustrophobic. I say it more like socially speaking, there was no room for errors. People had to live in a certain way. It was very normative. There was literally no room to experiment. It's one of the reasons my mother's sister died, and I just couldn't take it. I just wanted to be in a place where people did not know me, and New York seemed like a good place to get lost in.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kay Sohini, comic artist, researcher, and writer. Her new book is called This Beautiful, Ridiculous City. If you're one of the millions of New Yorkers who came here from somewhere else, we'd love to hear from you why you came to this beautiful and ridiculous city. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's talk to Tibor, who's calling in from New Jersey. Hi, Tibor. Thank you so much for calling All Of It. You are on the air.

Tibor: Thank you very much. I hope it's not going to be feedback. My name is Tibor Spiegel. I am originally from a country used to be called Yugoslavia. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: Yes, I can hear you. When did you come here?

Tibor: Okay. I came out as an exchange student back in the '70s, and in '79, I spent two weeks in New York City. At that time, Exxon had these free concerts by the Philharmonics and Zubin Mehta was a conductor. I was witnessing a live concert for free in New York City Park. Zubin Mehta conducting Mahler's Fifth. To me, that was amazing, free stuff in America, the world renowned Philharmonics, so that just blew my mind. I got so much impressed by it. I fell in love with New York City.

I came back later in the '80s and the 48th Street, I don't know if you remember, at one point, that was the musical street. On 48th Street you had all these music stores. If you were long enough standing on the street, you run into celebrities coming to buy guitar strings, coming to buy stuff. You can meet anybody who was somebody in New York, musician or even world renowned. I met Stevie Wonder, shook hands with him. He said hello in my language, "Zdravo." That blew my mind. The music was my attraction to New York. I worked in New York for 30 years. I'm in Jersey right now. The original question, what brought me back to New York is music, music, music.

Alison Stewart: Tibor, thank you so much for that statement. This text says, "I was drawn to the city because of its sense of community. You step out your door and encounter people in places that feel like home." One of the motifs in the book is we keep returning to you on the tarmac at JFK with some of your initial thoughts before deplaning coming to New York. Why did you want to revisit that moment?

Kay Sohini: I think the day I came here, it was-- I still remember it very clearly, the evening, the plane just sat on the tarmac for a while because it was a stormy evening. It was raining. It was raining super hard. I remember just sitting there, I was all alone. I just kept thinking, "Did I make a mistake?" Because all the people I left behind. I just felt this sense of guilt because I knew everything I was leaving behind, I was leaving behind with them. They would still have to go through everything I tried to leave behind, if that makes sense.

Over time, I just realized that me staying there and not being my best self wouldn't have been of any help to them, so as I progressed through the story, I come upon the realization that me leaving did not have to do with my own guilt, but somebody else's.

Alison Stewart: Were there other themes that you wanted to reflect in the book and the visual style of the book to help us understand your story?

Kay Sohini: I guess the one thing is, the reason I call this a beautiful, ridiculous city is, as we know, New York, it's a beautiful city, but it does have its problems. I do not like it when non-New Yorkers say it, but if you live here, you are on the right to complain about it. At the end of the day, I do feel very optimistic about the city and it's because I'm the sort of person who just needs to believe in some kind of magic. I don't know, be it Shahrukh Khan or be it New York City, it just has to be something bigger than myself because, like I mentioned, I am capable of working super hard, but I'm also somebody who gets sad very often, for no reason at all. For those moments, I really need something bigger than myself, something magical like New York, the myth of New York to just, pull me back.

Alison Stewart: Let's take another call. This is Bobby calling in from Jersey City, New Jersey. Hi, Bobby, you are on the air.

Bobby: Hi, everyone, thanks for taking my call. I came as a dreamer child to New York 35 years ago when I was 17. It's definitely a hard place to survive for someone who's undocumented, especially if you're an artist. I think it's also the best place because the greatest thing about this country is that even if you're undocumented, you may not be able to collect a paycheck or get a job, but you can definitely start a company and employ American citizens, pay taxes, you just can't collect a paycheck, but your so called company pays for all your expenses, which is amazing.

Here I was at the age of 25, undocumented, but I have 25 photographers working for me, which is amazing. Thanks New York for everything you've given me.

Alison Stewart: Bobby, thanks for calling. The thing that I also think is so interesting in your book, and I hope I can find the page, is that, you're obviously enthralled by literary references, but then you also have references to Friends. Do you remember the first time you saw TV that was situated in America?

Kay Sohini: Yes, it was Friends. I was pretty sure it was Friends. I loved them. They felt like my own friends. It probably makes me sound like a loser, because I didn't-- I was just so into American culture from so far away. I don't know, it just felt so cozy. I know, I've rewatched Friends recently, and some of the jokes are quite inappropriate now, but aside from all that, I don't know, it's just so cozy and nostalgic. There's something about it.

Alison Stewart: Have you thought about how your roots in suburban Calcutta have colored the way you think about New York and what it has to offer?

Kay Sohini: I think one of the first things that I want to mention is, which has nothing to do with New York at all, but the fact that I grew up in such a terribly small town that made me want to find the opposite. What is possibly the biggest city that I could move to? New York was everywhere. It was an obvious choice that way.

Alison Stewart: You also shout out many writers by name. Do you have a version of New York you found to be the most accurate in your experience based on what they wrote?

Kay Sohini: I don't know. I feel like everybody's New York is a little different, and it changes, too, from one phase of your life to the other, because when I came here at the beginning, I remember being insanely optimistic. I was just so eager. It was just all about everything that is good about this world and everything that is terrible about the one I left behind, but now I feel like I have a bit more tempered love for the city. I don't know, I don't think I can pick any one author's depiction of it.

Alison Stewart: There's a part of your book, this is hard, that you write about recovering from an abusive relationship and you say it did a number on your memory, to be honest. What did you want to communicate in this book about memory and identity?

Kay Sohini: I've been thinking about this a lot, is that when something like that happens to you and somebody lies to you over and over and over again over the period of, I don't know, five, six, seven years, you actually start questioning your own reality, and that messes with your identity and what you think of yourself. I know diaspora books are supposed to be often about racial identity, but I wanted to talk about this aspect as well, because this really shaped or destroyed my 20s in a way that affected my identity long term.

Alison Stewart: You said it did affect your identity long term, or it did not?

Kay Sohini: It did. It was only, moving here and moving away from it all, putting, literally, a lot of physical distance between there and here that I was finally able to actually find myself again. I felt like it was connected to the diaspora story somehow, even though that it didn't happen here at all.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kay Sohini. The name of her book is This Beautiful, Ridiculous City. The book takes forays in social commentary. It uses your illustrations to communicate a little bit of sociology here and there. Why did you feel the book needed the more scholarly, abstract asides? There's a whole page, you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that. I learned something new here."

Kay Sohini: I think for the simple reason that I came to comics from my PhD in English. I was doing a PhD in English at the time. One of my mentors was Nick Sousanis, who has this really cool academic comic book called Unflattening. I drew my doctoral dissertation as a comic, following his footsteps, and that's how I got into comics from academia. It's just not something I did consciously. It's just my research background that seeped into the story, I suppose.

Alison Stewart: New Yorkers always have the, "Should I stay or should I go?" How are you feeling about New York? Are you glad you're here? Do you have fantasies of living someplace else?

Kay Sohini: No, I'm not ready to leave yet. I am not ready to leave yet. I do want to live here for as long as I can.

Alison Stewart: Have you thought of your sense of belonging? Do you belong in New York?

Kay Sohini: Yes, I think so. I don't know, when I look around, you can walk in any block and you will hear so many people talking in different languages. There's food from all over the world. Everybody belongs here.

Alison Stewart: What are the contours of belonging? What does that mean to you?

Kay Sohini: I guess it's just a place that you can call home, regardless of whether you were born here or not. That's literally it.

Alison Stewart: What do you want someone to take away from your beautiful book?

Kay Sohini: Aww, thank you.

Alison Stewart: It is really beautiful. I should say that.

Kay Sohini: Thank you. I don't know. I guess I just want them to hopefully, think critically about the state of the world a little bit, but also be a little optimistic at the end of it.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, a graphic memoir by Kay Sohini. Thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate your time today.

Kay Sohini: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.