Publication
that earn trust
Built to last.

The piece landed on the desk on the hundredth anniversary of Mein Kampf — not a history lesson so much as a warning, drawing a straight line from Hitler's 700 pages to the Israeli state's own actions in the present day. The writer, Pramod K Nayar, wasn't asking readers to relive history so much as to recognise it repeating. My brief from the desk was one line: give it a page that stops the scroll, without putting Hitler's face anywhere near it.

That was the actual problem — how do you make a reader recognise a monster without drawing him? I kept coming back to the fact that most of us could pick Hitler out from a single detail: that comb of hair. Not the eyes, not the mustache, just that one dark, oddly shaped swoop. So I drew nothing else. One solid black silhouette, blown up until it took over the top of the page, ambiguous enough that for half a second it could be a bird, an ink stain, anything — and then it isn't. The headline sits low, almost under it, so the shape does the first read and the words confirm what you already felt.

Hyderabad used to hold what the writer called a multidirectional eco-memory — trees, street dogs, birds, all of it — before the city's corporate and educational sprawl flattened that into a mono-memory of humans and their wheels. That's Pramod K Nayar's argument, and on the page it reads dense, almost academic. My job was to make someone feel the loss before they'd read a single line of it.

I didn't want a sad tree in the corner of the page as decoration — I wanted the tree to be the article. So the body copy itself became the trunk: one long justified column, set on the diagonal, leaning across the page exactly the way a tree falls. A man swings a chainsaw into the stump at the bottom, and instead of wood chips, it's loose letters flying up out of the cut — the words scattering before they resettle into that leaning column above. Cut the tree, and you're literally cutting the story loose.

A hundred and twenty-five years after Dracula was first published, the character has outlived every other literary monster through sheer volume of film, TV and stage adaptations — and that longevity, not another Halloween hook, was the actual subject of Pramod K Nayar's piece. The obvious trap here was doing a "spooky season" page — bats, fangs, a full moon — and ending up closer to a costume-shop window than a newspaper feature.

What actually makes Dracula last, I think, is that he's barely in most of his own stories — it's the cape, the threshold, the invitation, that we remember. So I drew the cape wide open across the whole page like a curtain being pulled back, bat-wing collar at the top standing in for a masthead flourish, and put nothing where the body should be. The article itself — Pramod's text — fills that empty space. The count isn't illustrated. He's implied, and the reader's imagination does the rest, which is exactly the trick the novel plays.