Apsara Engine

A favorite read this summer.

I hardly know how to start describing it, but I keep coming back to the story "Swandive,” featuring the “intersectional cartographer,” Onima Mukherjee—whose work, drawn figuratively and literally from her body, is as much about inventing spaces as describing ones that already exist. “It’s a future, I suppose,” she explains at one point, with a meaningful half-smile, to an academic colleague who just awkwardly hit on her. However self-effacing, the line could very well be the book’s theme—a quiet testament to the culturally redemptive power of transness.

Som was previously an architect, and her drawings, even at their most incisive, have the feel of elegant blueprints. True, the careful straight lines can feel confining—like quietly violent prisons within which the characters sometimes seem trapped. There are the subtly abusive relationships, the endless alcohol-fueled party chats, the dishonesties hidden in plain sight. Yet there are also moments of extraordinary possibility.

The title hints at both spirit and science, but the book moves beyond that duality, even as it keeps it in tension. On the final spread, Rajiv, a character who claims he’d “really rather be alone,” takes forever to extricate himself from a social gathering—frame after frame brings him closer to the door even as he lingers silent and wraithlike among the other guests. It’s a brilliant visualization of our complex (if at times reluctant) interconnectedness. Apsara Engine gently pushes us to embrace that condition—with the promise that going deeper into the machine may help us better understand the ghosts that move it.