There is no getting away from it — the man is quirky. His study walls are lined with photographs of Gandhi. But these are not familiar images — the Mahatma is not leading the Dandi march; nor is he smiling his toothless grin. Instead, he is sporting an Elvis hairdo. He is wearing a pointed Ku Klux Klan hat. He is playing badminton in shorts at the Wimbledon. And he is a single column news story about a missing nine-year-old called Bapu. “Bapu, if you are reading this please come home, enough is enough,” says the text. “Father jovial, mother serious, the country even more serious.”

The images were a part of an exhibition that architect-writer Gautam Bhatia mounted in Delhi five years ago. The idea, he explains, was to show Gandhi in the way that he wasn’t — so that you could look at a picture and laugh at its absurdity. “But not too many people laughed,” rues Bhatia. “Then one of his grandsons — I think it was Ramu Gandhi — laughed. And once he started laughing, the others went ‘Ha ha, bahut badhiya hai’ (this is great),” he says.

Some won’t find his new venture — a graphic novel — very funny either. Called Lie — a Traditional Tale of Modern India — the book, written by Bhatia and illustrated by three Rajasthani miniaturists, Shankar Lal Bhopa, Birju Lal Bhopa and Ghansham, stretches truth to such an extent that it becomes a lie.

“So much of what was perpetuated in the book was a lie,” says Bhatia, 57, as sunlight streams into the study in his south Delhi house. “The politician pretends he is doing work for the poor, but he is inaugurating a speed-breaker. The people think something good will come out of it — so their life is as much a lie as that of the politician. The book itself is a lie,” he says.

The characters are the stereotypes — caricatures of even those one-dimensional figures that dot the world of soap operas and Hindi films: the aggressive mother-in-law, the submissive daughter-in-law, the corrupt politician, the greedy officer and so on. But Bhatia and his artists are actually walking the thin line between reality and imagination. The corrupt politician, a man called Bhola Mishra, is from Bihar and sports a Lalu Prasad hairstyle. Prime Minister Rekha Pande is a former street walker with a streak of white zigzagging through her black hair.

Lie is as quirky as its writer. The mother-in-law goes around routinely getting rid of the baby girls that pop out of her daughter-in-law’s womb with great regularity and at the most inconvenient places (restaurants, cinema halls, banks and so on). She dumps them into dustbins, in her jewellery locker and once takes a newborn to a paper shredder.

And all this happens while India goes through a drought, the Prime Minister imposes an Emergency and a man called Ali Baba burns down a train. “In the police station, meanwhile, policemen were busy playing rummy, watching television and raping a minor. A normal day,” says one panel.

Bhatia is uncomfortable about calling his book a graphic novel. “A graphic novel should be able to tell a complete story in pictures. Words play a minor role, to take you from one frame to another. In this case, the word came first, and the frame came later,” he says of Lie, which came out of a Ford Foundation project, Desh ki Awaaz, a collaborative effort with traditional artists. The project is now being exhibited in Delhi.

Yet Bhatia is not among those either who’d describe a graphic novel as a comic by another name. “In a way, it is a comic. But that’s also like saying War and Peace is a story book,” he says.

The author of 12 published books is not very sure that he’ll work on another graphic novel again. “I can’t think in pictures,” he says.

Bhatia’s fondness for the written word is an offshoot of his passion for architecture. When he was 13, he left Delhi for the United States after his journalist father was posted there. When he returned to Delhi in the early Eighties after 18 years, armed with a masters in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, he found that his old city had changed.

So he started writing, his muse roused by all that he saw around him. “You wrote because of something that you hated intensely, or loved intensely. Hate and love were important reasons to write.” His 1994 book Punjabi Baroque emerged out of his encounters with his clients, one of whom wanted a house like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

The constant drill of activity in cities disturbs him. He came back to India to see Delhi ballooning for the Asian Games, and now sees a replay of that, on a much larger scale, as the city gets excavated for the Commonwealth Games. “I always feel how incomplete the places we live in are. You never feel a state of wholeness in the city — you never feel that it is now complete and you can start using it. Because as soon as it is done, the next day they do some road widening or something.”

The state of flux finds a place in his books, which include Silent Spaces and Other Stories of Architecture and Malaria Dreams and other visions of Architecture. “These were not serious books on architecture, but reflections on the social demands that were expected of architecture. Later it became fun to look at other issues as well.”

In his own structures, he tries to inject an element of fun too — and often finds himself facing an obstructive wall in the shape of his clients. While designing a hotel, he had thought of putting a family drawn in stone in the deep end of a swimming pool that would be visible only at night when the lights were on. “But the clients said, no, no, this looks like they are all drowning, nobody will use the pool and so on. But I thought it would have made it interesting and different from the standard pool.”

It isn’t just the idea of fun that eggs him on. It’s important, Bhatia stresses, to create “a sense of disturbance” in the landscape. “We only have the disturbance of incompleteness,” he says.

The architect, however, is known to create “a sense of disturbance” away from the drafting board as well. Once, when a magazine wanted to photograph him for an article that he had written, Bhatia made his office boy pose as him. “He was thrilled. The photographer said, do this — and he happily posed.” The photographs were published, and kicked up a row. “No, it didn’t go over too well,” he admits. “After that I was never asked to do anything for the magazine.”

Fortunately for him, it’s not writing that sustains him. “Architecture is still my bread and butter. I earn nothing from writing. I just write between trips to the site, or waiting at a train station. It’s not that kind of a thing where I take a cup of coffee in the morning and sit next to a window with a sheaf of papers.”

In between sites, he is now contemplating a series of short films or narratives about religion — a collaborative work with a few others. “I don’t know what form it will take. It may not even see the light of day. But it’s fun doing it. It’s again the same technique of stretching the truth.”

His family is worried. “They say religion is a dangerous area in India; the minute you do this, you’ll get tossed out. So we have to take it cautiously of course.”

Before he moves to Qatar? “Yes, soon there will be lots of Indians there,” he smiles.

Till then, of course, there is some urgent work to be done. His exhibition in Delhi has a section where he has placed Indian figures in well known paintings from the world. The Dalai Lama is on a crucifix, Amitabh Bachchan replaces Christ in The Last Supper and Narendra Modi is there in the 1930 painting American Gothic.

His lawyers have, however, told him that some of the works may land him in trouble. So Bhatia has withdrawn a few — including one of a Renaissance painting of a nude woman, where he had substituted the original with an image of a woman politician. Last heard, Bhatia was waiting for the catalogues to arrive, so that he could rip out some of the images. If he doesn’t do that, even Qatar wouldn’t do. It will have to be the North Pole.