Sanika Phawde (She/They) is an writer-illustrator, educator, cartoonist and reportage artist born and raised in Thane (Near Mumbai), India and currently working between New York City and Boston. Through autobiographical comics, visual essays, drawings on location, gouache paintings and illustrated interviews with members of her local community, her work captures and communicates instances of emotional connection and intimacy, queer immigrant culture and conversations people have over meals. Sanika has worked with clients such as Spotify, Simply Gum, Ole and Steen, Uber India, The New Yorker, Food & Wine Magazine among others. Their work has been awarded and recognized and featured by the One Club for Creativity, D&AD (Design and Art Direction), VICE, PRINT Mag, Creative Boom, American Illustration, Boston Globe, The Nation, The Society of Illustrators, and the Comics Beat among others. Sanika has exhibited work in group shows at Rendez-vous Carnet Du Voyage (Clermont-Ferrand, France), Jamestown Arts Centre, Pao Arts Center (Boston), Woods-Gerry Gallery (Providence), SVA Gramercy gallery and the SVA Chelsea gallery, City Hall (Jersey City) and Secrets Risograph show in Hamburg, among others, and has been invited to exhibit her work at numerous book fairs.
YELP REVIEW
It is raining outside, and inside
our 300 sq ft studio apartment.
There is a hole in my ceiling, a package thief in my building,
wet plaster of paris splattered on the floor.
We have become used to waking up to little floods.
Something about repeatedly twisting out of bed
to step into an unexpected indoor pool.
Can make you want to give up.
The apartment almost caught fire last week.
I woke up coughing
to a room filled with dense smoke.
Apparently the hot plate
that came with the room
in place of a kitchen likes to turn itself on
even when the dials are off.
John found a human turd in the laundry room.
On Fourth of July, someone started a fire
in the industrial sized community trash can
behind the building.
I saw its reflection in the window
of the building next to ours.
For a second it looked like that room was on fire.
I almost called the fire department.
Then I heard people celebrating.
By morning it was a heap of bluish grey ash,
garnished with bits of melted plastic.
One night a naked white man
covered in tribal tattoos
who lives on my floor
took it upon himself to throw his body
against our front door repeatedly
from 8pm to 3:30am
on a Thursday night.
We sat wide awake wordless
in the darkness holding hands.
Pretending we weren't there.
I learn that there is lead in our walls.
Yours too,
if your home was built before the 1970s.
But in New England they have to explicitly declare it
in the lease.
So I know for sure.
You can drink the tap water though.
Until you can’t.
We get an alert fron the state that the water supply is contaminated.
We should buy our drinking water till they lift the advisory.
"What do you think it is?"
“Poop. It's usually some idiot shitting in the reservoir."
"But that's absurd."
"Yes. But it has happened before."
Our downstairs neighbor takes up smoking tobacco in her bathroom.
Where there are no windows, only the exhaust
that carries her smoke up into our home
so that it too may smell like a casino.
The only remedy: leaving our exhaust on for all hours of the day.
The issue: our exhaust sounds like Emily Rose
from The Exorcism of Emily Rose
mid-exorcism.
This building is not haunted.
But it is trying to kill us, yes.
When we first moved here
we tried to change things, fix them.
We put in work orders. Filed complaints.
Tried to have appliances replaced.
Now we just live around the small catastrophes.
We keep our hot plate unplugged at all times.
Make sure our door is double bolted.
When one of the 2 light bulbs
in the apartment goes out,
we learn to appreciate mood lighting.
When we awoke to to the songs of rain on the skylight last night
we just moved our shoes, plants, work desk, side table, bicycle and bed
out of the radius of the drip.
There are multiple ways to exist in a studio space.
We count the weeks until we can leave:
38 days and 2 hours.
This is the first Yelp review I have ever written.
We do not recommend living here.
WRATH ALLOY
I grip the rock of my rage in my throat.
Where it brands me in secret.
Melts into its own heat,
drips into spaces between the bones in my neck
and hardens into an infectious pain
For me to carry.
Like my mother.
Who holds her fury in her eyes,
averted
She refuses to share it with ones who have wronged her.
She refuses to share herself.
Not her voice, not her gaze nor her touch.
She teaches through creating a scarcity of herself (threatening an extinction).
She learns through the scalding loneliness.
My father writes his anger into texts he will regret.
Deeply Uncomfortable WhatsApp forwards,
he slips it into objects of daily communal use
strewn about him strategically
For us to slip and fall and hurt and notice Him.
My partner slams his heavy anger into cupboards,
crashes it into dishes,
throws it into metal trays banging
clanging clattering against the sink.
Punches it into walls with expletives.
Working like so many incantations
compounding it
into the foundations of our home.
Making it load-bearing.
Like his mother
Who blessed him with it.
And his sisters and his nieces.
Taught them to deposit it, grunting
into the rooms around them.
Taught him to hide it in the steering wheel.
Inside coffee cups.
In all the odd numbered aisles of our grocery store. Never even.
In every third crack in the pavement
in the hurtling interstate Commuter Rail
taught him to bend it into waves neither of them can control.
Till it becomes its own being.
When we marry,
amidst all our finery
and lovelier attributes
we roll our similar angers
from our dissimilar parents
up the hill.
Into an unfamiliar home.
And hope they will get along.
POEM FOR JOHN
I would love to return to you
from my adventures
to tell you
how clear the glacial water was
how it tinted the colourful pebbles
under it aquamarine
how warm the sun felt
even as the air pushed me to clutch my jacket tighter
around my body.
How loud the Puget Sound echoed
through the hills in Anacrotes.
But I know I love you.
Because I would rather ask
Do you remember?
How clear the water was?
How silver the sand?
How it squeezed in place
submerged upturned tangles
of towering knotted tree roots and stumps,
bleached white
older than our ancestors?
And I asked you,
"Do you know how they get like that?"
Do you remember the man on the beach?
Fishing for pink salmon
that run upstream once every two years?
And his yellow plastic box of assorted bait
that looked and functioned a lot like
a multi-tiered jewelry box
(I told you)
I had when I was 13?
How liberating it felt to afford our first pairs of proper hiking boots?
No more slipping and sliding in Converse
no more crossing canyons and river barefoot
no more raw-dogging the mountains for us.
Do you remember?
How you ran panicked
through the forest
through several campsites
past prehistoric fern species
for over two miles
in search of a port-a-potty?
Do you remember how
you were worried about kissing me
because you thought you were
coming down with something?
How the billboard sized marquee
outside the only grocery store
at that US-Canada border announced:
"Customer of the week: Trisha"
and we tried to imagine what it must be like
to be Trisha's best friend in town?
I know I love you because
I would rather you be my witness
than my confidant
would rather be in each other's stories
for when we are ancient, and
I can hardly believe
how happy
I have the potential to be.
"Do you remember?"
How far from lonely
how lovely.
How in love.
RHODE ISLAND: A NON-EXHAUSTIVE LIST
A large open air warehouse
filled to the ceiling with mulch
you can see into
while you drive past on the I-95.
Another filled with internal organs
and skins of RIPTA buses.
The way that none of the exit numbers
on the actual highway
match the exit numbers on any map apps
because the state meant to change them
on the ground last year.
But hasn’t gotten around to it.
Signs next to the state’s construction projects
erected by the state itself
announcing how many days late
and dollars over budget each project is.
Hilariously underperforming,
but brutally honest.
Benefit Street embraced in hundred year old trees
that carpet the ground with small white
richly fragrant flowers in the spring,
and dried leaves in autumn.
So you can feel like like a kid
when you crunch-cronch your way home.
The lawyer’s office, the dentist, the thrift store,
the restaurants, the patisserie, the butcher,
the hardware store, the many ceramics studios
that all look like somebody’s home
because they were somebody’s home in the 1800s.
And haven’t changed their exteriors since.
And the houses!
Mansions! Or cutesy and colourful
life size wooden doll houses
wrapped in the memory of Victorian trimmings
(“built with sticks à la second little pig”):
John grew up here and hates this analogy.
But doesn’t deny it!
The log cabin that they say
George Washington pooped in one night.
the severely haunted Bridgewater Triangle
by the spirits of Wampanoag people massacred here.
A comically large inflatable blue bug affixed to a roof
also known as Nibbles Woodaway
(claimed to be the largest artificial bug in the world).
Amidst these things, they say
have “always been here”
some things unexpected:
Personal Injury lawyers fighting for real estate
on billboards, passive aggressively trying
to out-perform, out-entertain, out-seduce.
This month,
you can "In Pain, Call Wayne" !
(His current avatar: a 3D Blender-generated illustration.)
But "Rob Levine
(shirtless and jacked with a single rose stem between his teeth)
Will Slip and Fall For You."
The church sign congratulates the high school graduating class of 2023.
And also says Eid Mubarak
the permanent horseshoe crab exhibit in the public library
is expanding to other species.
That one practically historic local lemonade stand
is flirting with a line of (far too potent) THC infused products.
Racist women follow me around map stores in Newport
and a racist bus driver in Jamestown
bullies me into getting off the last bus home.
More racism from passengers
on the MBTA.
Actually, more racism per week
than I have ever experienced anywhere before.
But also,
kind desi deli-wala uncles,
“The Frooti and Kurkure is a gift beta.”
Truly accessible and inclusive artist spaces
a community of badass elder femme ceramicists
who freely share their knowledge and stories.
Really incredible Yucatan, Moroccan, Syrian, and Korean food.
And the best cakes!!!
The sunsets in Prospect Terrace.
Can remind you how to breathe again.
Almost everyone I have met here
seems to have a funny/scary personal story
about former mayor, Buddy Cianci.
The many many vanity license plates
that mention the beach.
White people losing their shit to RRR
In Roger Williams Park.
A whole generation
identifying as Fienstein Junior Scholars.
The bizarre mystery/rumour that the city of Providence
yanked out the oldest colonial houses
from various neighborhoods
and replanted them on Benefit Street.
But how????
I once told myself
I would figure that one out before I left.
But I like not knowing.
It is more fun this way.
Like eavesdropping on tipsy adults
sharing ghost stories at Christmas.
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