Draft:Apsara Engine

Apsara Engine is a 2020 graphic short story collection by Indian-American cartoonist and graphic novelist Bishakh Som, published by The Feminist Press. The collection comprises eight speculative fiction stories featuring predominantly South Asian characters and explores themes including gender, identity, diaspora, and interpersonal relationships. Set across interconnected speculative worlds, the stories combine traditional South Asian visual and cultural motifs with futuristic settings and technologies, while centering women and gender-diverse characters.

The collection consists of the stories "Come Back to Me", "Throat, Meena & Aparna", "Apsara Engine", "Pleasure Palace", "Swandive", "Love Song", and "I Can See It in You". Although each story functions independently, recurring characters, settings, and themes connect them into a shared fictional universe.

Apsara Engine received positive critical reception and was awarded the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comics and the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel/Comics.

Synopsis

Come Back to Me

Sarah and her partner, James, have moved from the city to a house by the ocean. Sarah enjoys long walks on the beach, during which she reflects on her relationship, her friendships, and her past. She seeks a state of "glorious nothing" and mental stillness. She describes her engagement to James as the "longest and strangest engagement ever". The narrative centres on a past affair she had with a younger musician while James was working overseas. The younger musician is depicted as a mermaid-like figure whose gender is not visually apparent. The artwork is monochrome, featuring detailed renderings of domestic interiors and expansive seascapes. Surreal sequences depict Sarah and her lover underwater, pursuing one another and embracing. The story then cuts to Sarah in her bathtub, where James checks on her. In the final panel, Sarah remains in the bathtub in a state of mild delirium as she pulls a starfish from her hair.

Throat

In what appears to be an elaborate bar or café, Mark meets Susan. Susan is accompanied by Kiki, a small humanoid creature with the face of a young girl, long hair, and the body of a puppy, who wears a leash around her neck. Susan describes Kiki as her "baby" and discusses a Swiss training programme used to treat her asthma. She asks Kiki to say her name, which she does, while Susan boasts about a vocalisation programme based on mimicry, repetition, and breath control. Susan explains that the training has enabled Kiki to better manage her asthma attacks. She then leaves to get a glass of wine, asking Mark to watch over Kiki. In Susan's absence, Kiki struggles to say, "I need to talk to someone", prompting Mark's concern. Upon returning, Susan immediately accuses Mark of being harsh with Kiki, while Mark insists that Kiki is "aware of herself". Enraged, Susan leaves the bar with Kiki.

Meena & Aparna

Two friends, Meena and Aparna, meet for dinner on Aparna's birthday while her husband, Ashok, is away. Aparna convinces Meena to have a drink with her, which the latter is initially reluctant to do. Aparna pesters Meena about her love life, which appears to be lacking at the moment. Meena breaks into a tirade about how she is not into the "Homo sapiens species" in general, leading Aparna to call her a misanthrope. They end up visiting a clothing store, where Aparna buys Meena a dress, much to Meena's dismay. They return to Aparna's apartment at the end of the night. It is revealed that Ashok had planned a surprise party for Aparna, which Meena was aware of. Aparna finds the party overwhelming and expresses her annoyance openly. She ultimately asks all the guests to leave, including Ashok. The final panel features Aparna and Meena alone, Meena still donning the dress Aparna bought for her, while Aparna rests her hand on Meena's shoulder, embracing her from the side.

Apsara Engine

This eponymous story is told through overlapping vignettes set across different time periods and locations, including "Da'ara City" and "Sheila's Front Room" in 1968. It touches on themes of political protest, massacres, and personal departures. The panels are structured as circular vignettes overlaid on complex, organic, and futuristic architectural maps. The colour palette is vibrant, evoking a world in which different timelines and geographies coexist on a single plane.

Pleasure Palace

A woman calling herself "Edith" visits a futuristic resort. She meets Craig, an American researcher, and listens to his stories about his life in Boston. The narrative shifts into a fable-like story Edith tells Craig about a princess and her companion, Maya, who are separated by a vizier's plot that leads to Maya's death. Craig is eventually brought to Edith's home, which appears to be a nomadic camp exclusively for women. He is asked to perform a naked ritual called "Bhavatiya", which frightens him into leaving. The resort is drawn with detailed strokes. The fable within the story is drawn in a flatter, more traditional narrative style, with bordered panels. The nomadic camp features massive, intricate tent structures that blend ancient and futuristic design.

Swandive

Onima Mukherjee presents a paper on "intersectional cartography" and "trans geographies". Afterward, at a bar, Onima meets Amrit. They bond over their shared identities as Desi trans people and discuss the feeling of being "unmoored" from both family and traditional culture. They engage in discourse about trans bodies containing within them the capability to unlock potentialities. In the elevator, Amrit attempts to kiss Onima, but is pushed away. Amrit is embarrassed and apologises immediately. Onima reassures Amrit, and invites them to their hotel room. Back at the hotel room, Onima uses their own blood to draw a map that magically manifests a futuristic, queer-centric city. The initial scenes are grounded in an academic/social setting. As the city is "imagined" into existence, the art becomes increasingly abstract and elaborate, using interconnected diagrams and overlapping figures to represent a "magical future."

Love Song

A narrative poem explores domestic intimacy and the narrator’s fear of aging and cognitive decline. The narrator recalls shared travels and mourns friends and family lost to time or accidents. ‘Love Song’ features visuals that are narratively unrelated to the writing. They depict a woman walking through a mundane suburban neighborhood. She is accompanied by a bird-like creature that transforms into a large, human-headed hybrid being. The girl-bird figure bites off the protagonist’s finger. It carries the protagonist on its hind limbs as they rise for a brief flight, eventually dropping her to the ground. The story ends with a cosmic sequence where a giant four-armed goddess cradles the protagonist.

I Can See It in You

Rajiv and his girlfriend Sara attend a party. Rajiv is irritated by another guest, Josh, who offers unsolicited professional advice. In the kitchen, Sara meets a woman named Leela who is later revealed to be Rajiv's ex-girlfriend, Anjali. Anjali and Sara dance together in a moment of fluid camaraderie. Anjali confronts Rajiv outside, appearing to have knowledge of the future, predicting that Sara will eventually leave him for a "white guy" and move to a house on the beach. Set in a crowded, modern apartment party, the visual narrative captures the claustrophobia of social interactions. The story concludes with Rajiv leaving the party alone, rejecting Sara’s offer to come over later, and insisting that they talk the next day.

Themes

Identity and Gender

Questions of identity and gender emerge as the foremost recurring theme in Apsara Engine. Across the six short stories, characters occupying positions that resist fixed social or biological categories are featured repeatedly. Rather than presenting gender as stable or essential, Som depicts it as fluid, negotiated, and intertwined with memory, migration, and interpersonal relationships. Several stories foreground queer and transgender experiences while others employ speculative imagery to destabilize conventional understandings of the body and identity.

In "Come Back to Me", Sarah’s lover is an androgynous sea creature with mermaid-like features. "Meena & Aparna" explores emotional intimacy between two women through gestures and interactions that blur the line between platonic friendship and romantic entanglement, without ever explicitly defining the nature of their relationship. "Pleasure Palace" depicts a women-only, dome-shaped enclosure where women engage in leisure, laughter and, as hinted at, pleasure, in the fulfilling company of one another. Similarly, "Swandive" imagines an entire city, extending to an alternate spatial world, that is made by and for trans and queer people in a near-utopian, hyper-technological future. Across the collection, hybrid beings (such as Kiki in "Throat" and the girl-bird hybrid creature in "Love Song"), transformed bodies, and speculative environments function as metaphors for identities that remain open, mutable, and resistant to categorisation.

Diaspora and Belonging

In an interview, Bishakh Som states,

“As a child, when we’d go back to India from New York every two years, my parents would buy me Indian comics from streetside vendors to entertain me. I loved these comics, which focused on themes of Indian mythology, culture and history – though now I recognize how problematic they were in terms of problematic attitudes of caste, colorism and nationalism. But I always related to the stories that centered around women and related the ways in which they were powerful…and divine.”

Apsara Engine deals with the South Asian diasporic identity closely, with multiple South Asian characters featuring across the six stories. Her characters negotiate their queer identity in relation to their South Asian identity, exposing both the tension between them and their compatibility. For these characters, life in western urban environments becomes a matter of nuanced complication as well. In ‘Meena & Aparna’, the two best friends often switch to Bangla, their mother-tongue, even though they are assumed to have been living in the western world for quite a while. "Pleasure Palace" draws heavy references to Indian mythology and stylistic aesthetics, not just narratively, but also visually. The queer-feminist utopia that Som hints at is also, at its core, non-western. In "I Can See It in You", Som delves into an Indian man’s insecurities, when an ex-girlfriend, who is also Indian, claims that his present white girlfriend will ultimately leave him for a white man in future.

Som further develops the theme of belonging through recurring locations, characters, and visual motifs that connect otherwise independent narratives. Memories of home, imagined futures, and shared cultural references frequently overlap, creating a world in which identity is shaped not by a single place but by movement between places, relationships, histories and futures.

Speculative Narratives

The collection combines elements of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, mythology, and magical realism to present the reader with alternate pasts, presents and futures. Several stories incorporate speculative elements into otherwise familiar settings. From Sarah’s mermaid-like lover in "Come Back to Me", Kiki in "Throat", Da’ra City in "Apsara Engine", to the futuristic resort in "Pleasure Palace", Som draws from myths and folklore, combining them with an advanced technological imagination to produce a universe that is socially, culturally and politically unique and enthralling. Som’s background in architecture lends to her artistic precision and distinct imagination in the way she designs her panels. In an interview, Som states,

“Even though I’ve abandoned architecture, I still hold a little grotto in my heart for architectural sensibilities, for deliberate and cautious attitudes towards design. And so I love many aspects of European graphic design, for South Asian calligraphy and aesthetics, for the beauty of maps, interiors, landscapes, the beauty of a label on a jam jar, the colors and snugness of a subway train in Glasgow. And these are sometimes sensibilities that I love to import into my comics.”

The story, "Swandive" is the most explicit in its speculative imagination, as the two protagonists envision the outlines of a futuristic city that is queer by design. Overlapping timelines and alternate cityscapes feature throughout the book, as worlds that are apparently far apart, are collapsed into one, while the threads of tight-knit western communities are taken apart, scrutinized and problematized. Som employs speculative settings less to predict technological change than to envision new possibilities for human relationships, embodiment, and community.

References

1. Som, Bishakh. Apsara Engine. New York: The Feminist Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-936932-81-8.
2. Kirichanskaya, Michele. "Interview with Bishakh Som, Creator of Apsara Engine." Geeks OUT. 26 July 2024. https://www.geeksout.org/2024/07/26/interview-with-bishakh-som-creator-of-apsara-engine/
3. "Breaking Open New Worlds: An Interview with Bishakh Som." MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. https://www.maifeminism.com/breaking-open-new-worlds-an-interview-with-bishakh-som/
4. Publishers Weekly. "Apsara Engine." Review. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781936932818
5. Chiu, Anastasia. "Book Review: Apsara Engine." Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA), 20 November 2020. https://www.apalaweb.org/book-review-aspara-engine/