Illustrator Athulya Pillai’s silent comic, ‘Nanavu’, tells the story of tidal flooding in Kochi

A pair of pink slippers catches the eye of a little girl in Kochi. Her mother buys them for her and she wears it wherever she goes. She loves her pink slippers. But when she goes to bed, she keeps them on top of a shelf. Because she knows that when she wakes up the next morning, her home will be flooded. 

The book cover
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Nanavu, a silent comic by illustrator Athulya Pillai, conveys the daily reality of people living in the coastal regions of Kochi. Their life is a permanent battle with the tides — they have to constantly navigate the water and their dreams are largely dictated by it. 

Athulya Pillai
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Athulya is from Kochi, but her first-hand encounter with tidal flooding and affected regions was while she was working with Common Ground, India, a collaborative initiative aimed at enhancing ecological, social and economic wellbeing in rural India. She reached out to Equinoct, a Kochi-based modelling solution provider, and went on a field visit to Ezhikkara, one of the worst affected regions. A visit to KaBhumM, a climate-driven art initiative that brought the impact of climate change to the spotlight, in 2025, triggered something in her, says Athulya.

A page from the comic
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

“I had just come to Kochi from Ladakh, where I was working with a team making artificial glaciers, to conserve water and here, in Kochi, homes were submerged. The contrast was rather stark,” she adds. 

The thought, the uneasiness, the persistent wetness of feet refused to leave Athulya. Thus Nanavu was born. “It took me a while to establish the style of the comic — the flow of the narrative,” she says. Athulya spent time on the field, visited homes and saw how people pariticipated in documenting the flood.

She has deviated a bit from her usual style of using only three to four frames to using multiple frames. “I wrote it down first in the form of dialogues and then translated it into visuals,” says Athulya. “There needs to be a strong emotional starting point for the story. Once I got that, it was easy.”

She decided to keep it a silent comic (without dialogues), to denote “the silence with which the water comes in, the cries of the people that are not heard. There are no words, only the story of loss, but also resilience,” says Athulya. 

The 28-page book depicts the culture and geography of the Kochi coast in a carefully chosen palette of powder blue – the shrimp farms, the Pokkali fields, the moon and the tides, communities taking part in documenting the flood.

Yangdol, a book by Athulya Pillai
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Eldo, a book by Athulya Pillai
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

After her degree in Retail and Exhibition Design at MIT, Pune, Athulya travelled to Ladakh, where she stayed for three years. Soon after she shifted to Leh, she started to document her daily life through tiny doodles and pictures. That re-ignited her love for illustration and drawing. She has two picture books to her credit, Yangdol (published in 2021) that opens a window into the life of a Ladakhi girl who yearns to catch a glimpse of the snow leopard and Eldo, a book that dwells on inner and outer darkness, both co-authored with Pankaj Singh. 

Nanavu is an open invitation to learn how people across Kerala’s coastal landscapes track moon phases, fishing cycles and high tides to anticipate and prepare for flooding. 

Nanavu, published by Studio Niyat, is available at Mehrab Book Store