At around page 81 of Aditi Mali’s The Complete Shampoo and Daddy, the rabbit Shampoo discovers that they are a pyromaniac. Five chunky panels later, Shampoo has burnt the corner of the page off. The top right of page 83 is jagged and soot-blackened – slightly better off than the edges of page 85, which are completely ‘burnt’ off because Shampoo has by now passed on their pyromania to their friend, the pig called Daddy.

A few pages later, there is a neat hole through the page because the two blameless animals have once again taken a match to the book that hosts them. Mali’s collection of graphic short stories essaying the deep and troublesome friendship between a rabbit and a pig is entertaining, dark, depraved and an example of the mastery of book-making.

Published by Indian Summer Press, a new indie house, the book is the size of a (really thick) coaster. Its 240 pages fit into your palm and establish an odd intimacy with the two protagonists who spend no effort to be liked. They mess up, fight, burn pages and are often grotesque.

Yet you still feel at one with them – indeed, with the two-dimensional and often-ugly pig and rabbit – because Mali writes in the language of our lives. Shampoo and Daddy are plagued by the questions we are plagued by – what to eat, how to eat it, what to do with ourselves and how to fight the all-consuming envelope of sorrow that sometimes descends on us. Mali forces her two protagonists to do the most everyday things in the most distinguished ways possible.

Despite their and the book’s quirkiness, the tales told are meditative and almost fable-like with how simple yet resonant they are. A whole page is devoted to the crushing realisation that Shampoo has to dry their laundry. An entire chapter goes into the consideration of eating a jackfruit. Yet another, towards the things that happen when you decide to sleep – spoiler: Narendra Modi appears. The book follows no rules and ignores what little you as a reader aim to impose upon it.

Mali’s art is jarring – consider the close-up of the two creatures on the cover, for instance – and only very occasionally beautiful. The impression that the style is meant to convey is undoubtedly that it is rudimentary, and therefore, its own thing. The edges of the panels are rarely straight, and the carrots look like anyone could draw them. But, of course, such honesty of style comes only from a seasoned practitioner, and the cohesiveness of Mali’s art is testament to her expert world-building.

Shampoo and Daddy are extensions of Mali's online world of art, where she uses a statement lack of aesthetic beauty to tell us funny, wretched and everyday stories. It absorbs the reader without erecting the hurdle of immediate appreciation. In this world, homes can be cosy, and picnics can be sunny, but the dark circles under Daddy’s sleep-deprived eyes are also pretty brutal and inescapable.

One of the blurbs of the book is by one of Mali’s friends who says that they read the book whenever they feel like doomscrolling. It is actually quite easy to do this because of the number of things that this book isn’t. Shampoo and Daddy’s lives are no big adventure. There is no big plot, no gripping story, and there is certainly no beginning – although there might be a hint of an end.

You can open the book at any point and begin reading anew. The deliberate absence of an overarching plot makes it readily available to a non-doomscroller. It is a ridiculous book in a world so horrible of late, that only the bluntness of the world it creates makes sense.

We are perhaps accustomed to seeing barebones surrealist-seeming offerings from the West, but it is quite something to encounter an artist’s expression of the primordial gnaw at the stomach of the current human in India. With her rabbit and pig, Mali says quite a few things about our immediate surroundings even though she did not have to and could have well placed the world in a realm untouched by sabzi markets, Maggi Masala and Pogo channel.

As a reader, you get the feeling that the whole book has just had it with the world, and upon realising this, has decided to embrace the only parts of it that have survived the layers of grime intent upon choking its goodness.

Endearingly, this is something that this book knows and is unbothered by. It is also unbothered by most other things and revels in its straight-lacedness. As the chickens on page 111 say, “Ur missing out by not being stupid.”

I hope Mali keeps at it and there is more from the ridiculous, rules-bending world she has created.

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The Complete Shampoo And Daddy

Author: Aditi Mali

Publisher: Indian Summer Press

Year: 2026

Published in special arrangement with TheWire.in