Review: Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som

In the opening pages of Bishakh Som’s collection of short comics, ‘Apsara Engine’, a woman leaves her house and takes a walk along a beach that looks a lot like a lot of other beaches. As she walks, matter of fact narration walks along with her. When she encounters a mythical figure on the beach, we’re suddenly aware that this beach might not be like a lot of other beaches after all. In the following eight stories, across 237 pages, Som plays with the readers expectations of the world, the characters and the possibilities of comics story telling.

Many of the stories included in this collection feel like formal exercises: Som is drawing boundaries and pushing them, trying to figure out just how far she can take the reader before they fall away.

If the reviews on Good Reads are anything to go by, she pushed some readers too far. For others, ‘Apsara Engine’ filled a void in South Asian queer and trans narrative.

This glimpse into the imagined, strange and surreal felt intentional and controlled: you’re meant to spend time with these stories. You’re meant to be puzzled and to engage with the blurry edges. You don’t have to understand them to feel the impact of her storytelling and beautifully rendered illustration.

You can see the influence of Som’s years working as an architect in the way she configures space and embeds different kinds of cartography. In this way she offers a way of illustrating queer space and time. The clearest, and perhaps most successful, example of this is the story ‘Swan Dive’, in which a nonbinary academic presents a postcolonial cartography.

In ‘Swan Dive’ Som brings the full force of her powerful narrative pacing together with a studiously restrained dialogue and the graphic impact of her watercolors. The effect is an urgent and powerful road map for queer, postcolonial storytelling.

Bishakh Som has another book coming out later this year. A graphic memoir titled, ‘Spellbound’, it promises to elucidate many of the themes in ‘Apsara Engine’ but through the explicit lens of Som’s daily life. We eagerly await it’s publication.