meet your future best friends

seconds before their tragic death

Fiction, 2022

I’m not much of a short story collection reader. I like to read them when George Saunders emails me (we are not yet friends, and I am a mere subscriber to his newsletter), and I read newly published ones from magazines I enjoy. But rarely do I go to a bookstore, find a collection, and pick it up with a quickened pulse and glassy eyes. Despite this reservation, some of my favourite novels are written like short stories—where each chapter is a dazzling new story. How High We Go In The Dark follows this preferred structure, jumping across timelines, but crucially operating within the same pandemic-stricken world. 

The setup is simple. A group of scientists in the Arctic Circle are testing new organisms they find as ice caps melt (at an unprecedented rate). It is here that they encounter the body of a pre-historic girl, and while analysing the corpse for the cause of death in a cocooned laboratory, the virus that killed her slowly spreads. We move through different stories, encountering various families affected not only by the plague, but by a world that has fundamentally changed with the disease. 

In How High We Go In The Dark, a love story blooms over virtual reality, a spaceship’s interiors are painted for years, and elegy hotels comfort the grief-stricken—while turning a great profit. Each chapter of the novel is a dazzling feat of imagination, enough for one to pause and wonder how any mind could come up with ideas this interesting—and this biting. But what the novel does best is crafting compelling characters that force emotion from the reader. By the end, you have a room full of people who you are brutally invested in. 

My favourite story is about the rollercoaster of death, where fatally ill children and their families spend the whole day feasting on cotton candy and throwing up on several rides. The last ride is a rollercoaster with a sudden drop—their necks snap, and they are killed on the spot—leaving their last days on earth filled with sickly sweet happiness. 

Announcement: I have been tinkering with the idea of starting a bookcrumbs book club! But I am currently gauging interest, so please email me at mahikadhar@gmail.com if you are interested, or comment down below. We can host a hybrid event so that people from Delhi NCR can meet in person, and those from all over the world can join via Zoom. I picture it as a coven (or Matisse’s La Danse) of readers with different thoughts and tastes who can meet over a drink! Let me know if this excites you.

Film - Interstellar 

Song - Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens