New Delhi, Nov. 1 -- The opening pages of the graphic novel The Donkey Rider by visual artist Rai (Amrita Barua) aren't narrated by either of the two main characters-Ghurbat, a prisoner on death row, and law student Huma, who is petitioning to stop Ghurbat's execution. Instead, Rai makes a house lizard the narrator of these stage-setting, mostly black-and-white, pages (the house in question is the one Ghurbat once lived in). After a few surreal observations on the philosophical implications of an abandoned home, the lizard has a David Lynch-flavoured conversation with Ghurbat's disembodied head.

For what turns out to be a grounded, realistic, sobering read about the death penalty (and the structural inequities baked into India's legal-po...