Interview on “Wizards & Spaceships” podcast about opening chapters

I was interviewed on the Wizards & Spaceships podcast about writing great openings in scifi/fantasy stories. We geeked out about some favourites in popular media, and also shared a few “hot takes.” (Episode page)

Growing from literary rejection: Interview with writer and marketer Grace Flahive

A case study from the front lines of fiction publishing: novelist/marketer Grace Flahive talks about the dos and don’ts of pursuing publication, working with an agent, hooking editors, and learning from rejection. Read the transcript on Medium.

(Also, Grace mentioned beginning a new novel in this video. As of Spring 2025, that novel, Palm Meridian, has been published. So she is a living example of resilience on the path to publication.)

Finding your novel’s niche: Interview with the editor of “Crazy Rich Asians”

Literary editor Jenny Jackson shares how Crazy Rich Asians was able to find its niche to connect with readers. She also shares practical tips that help her authors focus their novel’s intent. Finally, she discusses her own transition from editor to author, and what she brought from her editorial experience into her writing process. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “Crazy Rich Asians” hooks readers: Building genre and expectations

How the opening chapters of the novel Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan build (and subvert) genre expectations to hook and satisfy readers. The novel knows exactly what readers expect, and the opening delivers on those expectations with surprise and delight. Read the transcript on Medium.

Interview on “Introverted Queen” podcast about storytelling and introversion

I was interviewed on the Introverted Queen podcast about storytelling, siblings, shyness, and introversion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How the prologue of “The Book Thief” hooks readers: A unique point of view

How the prologue of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak delivers an impressionistic look at the plot ahead, without spoiling that plot or even setting it up. Also, how the prologue teaches us to read the novel’s unique narrative voice without interrupting the story’s dramatic action. Read the transcript on Medium.

How the prologue of “A Game of Thrones” hooks readers: Instant gratification

How the prologue of A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin breaks from the Tolkien model of starting with heavy exposition and world-building, and instead delivers a simple action scene with sympathetic characters—a scene that also foreshadows the great conflicts of the novel and series. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “Saga” hooks readers: Starting with action

How the comic series Saga starts with a bang, dropping us into the middle of a story already in progress, and how its exposition delivers drama instead of information. Also, how Saga’s structure follows in the footsteps of the pilot episode of Lost and the opening of the first Star Wars film. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “The Hunger Games” hooks readers: Bringing a premise to life

How author Suzanne Collins creates a compelling high-concept premise in the opening chapter of The Hunger Games, how she brings that premise to life through character, world-building, and language, and how that premise conquered the literary world. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “The Road” hooks readers: Rooting for the underdog

How author Cormac McCarthy creates vulnerable characters that engage our emotions in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road. Also, how the literary theories of Greek philosopher Aristotle still apply today, and what the modern anti-hero gets right and wrong. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “Cloud Atlas” hooks readers: Delivering the unexpected

How author David Mitchell uses unexpected structure and language to hook readers in his novel Cloud Atlas. Plus, how the psychological concept of flow applies to great writing. Read the transcript (with extras) on Medium.

How “Coraline” hooks readers: Building a world

Great writers build spaces for compelling stories and settings that capture our imagination. Here's how author Neil Gaiman hooks readers using exploration and discovery of a setting in Chapter 1 of his novel Coraline. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “American Gods” hooks readers: A new life

A big change in a character’s life sets them on a new path and on a new story. See how Neil Gaiman uses the start of a new life to hook readers in his novel American Gods. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” hooks readers: Big questions

How author Susanna Clarke asks the right questions to hook readers and drive the story in the opening chapter of her fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Also, how the philosophy of Romanticism comes alive in the story and setting, and what writers can learn from cartoons. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “Life of Pi” hooks readers: The power of first-person storytelling

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel searches for the “spark that brings to life a real story.” Life of Pi itself uses first-person storytelling to light that spark. See how Yann Martel uses the power of first person in the opening chapters to hook the reader, and why the novel starts before the first page. Read the transcript on Medium.

How “The Philosopher’s Stone” hooks readers: Using voice instead of exposition

How the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone hooked readers, agents, and editors, using voice, mystery, and nostalgia. Read the transcript on Medium.

Teaching religious diversity using “The Faith Project”

In a spectacular TED talk, explorer Wade Davis reflected on the world’s cultures saying, “These myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being modern. They’re unique facets of the human imagination. They’re unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?” We’ve captured just a few of those myriad voices and unique answers in The Faith Project, an interactive documentary exploring the religious diversity of Canada.

Approaching faith outside of controversy

The public conversation around religious identity is often about how it fits into democratic identity—and even whether it can. Our news and social media are full of heated discussions on discrimination, accommodation, violence, travel restrictions, charters, and more.

Yet, as filmmakers, we wondered: What does faith look like outside of controversy? What is the daily beauty inside Canadians’ religious identities? What brings Canadians back to these traditions, again and again? How could we celebrate religious identity? We wanted to empower audiences to approach that conversation in a more optimistic and personal way. After all, religion isn’t an abstract political concept but a lived reality, and documentary film is about capturing lived reality.

Diverse rituals and unique identities

In communities across the country, we found everyday people living the answers to those questions. They’ve created sacred spaces in the grandest temples and the most unexpected corners. Those spaces are home to unique rituals and practices that people of faith shared with us. And in that sharing, they also described the hopes, frustrations and emotions that anchor their practices and define their identities. As a writer, researcher, educator and conflicted believer, I recognized my own struggles and curiosities in theirs. My relationships to those people and communities are permanently marked by the moments of beauty they shared.

Those moments are the foundation of The Faith Project’s seven short documentaries on prayer and identity. These films are portraits of seven unique Canadians, each with their own tradition, practice, and personal story.

Each portrait is part of a lifelong search for both transcendence and grounding in a hectic world. For so many Canadians, that search is at the core of what we call religious identity.

These stories will empower viewers with the knowledge and empathy for wiser conversations about the diverse society we share, helping them step outside the echo chamber where voices of ignorance, intolerance, and even, sometimes, violence reverberate too loudly. Here are the tools that will help you start those conversations.

Faith Project resources

iPad app

The free iPad app is the best way to experience The Faith Project’s seven short films. The app also contains educational information about the major religions, as well as photos, audio, and interactive mini-games. The educational information was written in consultation with experts of every faith. (The films can also be streamed online without these iPad-exclusive features.)

Educator’s guide

A 13-page educator’s guide complements the app’s learning experience. The guide includes lesson plans for the high-school level. Some discussion questions include:

• What values can we share when we learn about diverse faith communities?

• How do I understand rituals in the world around me?

• What is a symbol and why are symbols powerful? What are some examples of symbols in my life?

• What are sacred spaces and how do spaces impact us?

• If you could share a dimension of your identity through the medium of film, what would you record? How and why would you record it?

Q&A videos

Teachers can use these Q&A videos to generate classroom discussion or individual reflection. In these videos, our participants explore:

• Examples of belief becoming daily action

• Facts that aren’t commonly known about their faiths

• Examples of interfaith dialogue and cooperation

• Positives and negatives of religious life in Canada

• Challenges of maintaining spirituality

• Examples of faith affecting life decisions

This six-parts series is available for immediate viewing by CAMPUS subscribers. You may already have a subscription to CAMPUS through your school. Find out here.

Virtual Classroom

Two of our participants appeared in a Virtual Classroom along with the mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi. They answered questions about faith, public policy, and private struggle. These questions came directly from students across the country. The Virtual Classroom will be made available to CAMPUS subscribers soon. Meanwhile, you can read the Twitter conversation (#FaithProject).

Examining the app’s design

Teachers can discuss how design elements in the app reflect the theme of the documentary:

• The main menu arranges the films in a random order every time the app is launched.

• The films are identified by titles and characters rather than by religion.

• The fonts and music are neutral, playful and ethereal, to avoid stereotypical or ethnic associations.

Using social media to tell student stories

Students can also use Instagram, YouTube, or other social platforms to share their own stories (using #FaithProject). Whether they have a religious practice or not, what spaces feel transcendent to them? What are their moments of awe and wonder? How do those moments or places affect their lives and relationships?

Students should avoid “We believe” statements (“Christians believe” or “Hindus believe” and so on). They should also avoid negative statements (“As an atheist, I don’t believe in” or “As a Buddhist, I don’t think that”). Instead, they should use positive “I believe this” or “I do that” or “I feel this” statements, and express themselves using personal stories, as the people in The Faith Project do. Students familiar with mindfulness may describe their physical sensations or self-talk.

Making room for questions

The Faith Project isn’t only a response to crisis. Hopefully, it can also be a tool leading to a different path before crisis ever happens.

We believe (yes, I went there) that all viewers will find something relatable in the people and practices we’ve filmed. However, we also know this can be a difficult conversation. Teachers will be the wisest judges of how their students will react.

Additional resources to increase religious literacy

• Things Arab Men Say by Nisreen Baker, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

• “I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s why I left” – TED Talk by Megan Phelps-Roper

• Harvard EdX online course series: World Religions Through Their Scriptures

(This post also appeared on the NFB Education blog.)

The Beckoning Bell: Resilience and hope in video games and life

After I walk across the stone bridge, there’s a small cobblestoned plaza that forks into winding streets. I turn left, walking in the cramped alleys between old buildings. There are stairs, and an archway, and beyond, the buildings open up to a cemetery. It’s the only way to the old church, where they say there’s a cure for my illness.

As I cross under the archway and walk among the tombstones, I notice a lone figure. He’s dressed in an old trench coat. A wide-brimmed hat hangs over his face. Is he a gravedigger? No, this is Father Gascoigne. Like a butcher, he hacks away at something with a long axe: a body.

Like everyone else in Yharnam, he’s on the hunt. The city has fallen prey to what the remaining citizens call “the scourge of the beast”; those afflicted by this blood-borne sickness lose their humanity and turn into mindless creatures. According to the vigilante mobs that patrol the streets, the only way to stop the spread of the scourge is to hunt down those who’ve turned before they infect others.

Father Gascoigne looks up and notices me. He snarls like an animal. He’s sick, too, and is close to succumbing, but he’s still a hunter. Either I’m his prey, or he’s mine.The battle is over in mere moments. He tears me apart. My body collapses beside a grave and disintegrates into stardust. Everything goes black.

Then I wake up.

I’m back in the town square where everything began, and everything is as it was before. I’m stuck in a dream—no, a nightmare. The only way to escape is to face my fears and conquer them.

I race through the streets past the crazed mobs that are out on the hunt. I make it to the archway, to the cemetery, to him. Again, Father Gascoigne destroys me.

Again, I wake up.

Again, I run back to him.

Again, he manhandles me.

Again, I wake up.

I don’t know how many times I’ve died, but I’m ready to give up. I can’t beat him.

Do I have anything on me that might help me? I have a cleaver, Molotov cocktails, quicksilver bullets, a creaky music box, and an old iron bell. I look through my journal. There’s a note about this.

Hmm. I shake the bell. It rings.

A stranger from another dream hears its chime. He fades into my nightmare and greets me with a wordless bow. A friend? Sort of. It’s a real person somewhere out there who has volunteered to help anonymous strangers like me. If there are two of us, we can get past Father Gascoigne, and I can make it to the church, and I can find the cure to the sickness.

We walk into the cemetery. I run right, and the stranger runs left. Our enemy’s focus is split between us, but he’s still dangerous, bloodthirsty, relentless. He charges my new friend and, while he’s thrashing him, I hack at Father Gascoigne. He then turns to charge me, and he knocks me down, but leaves himself open for my friend to attack him.

We dance like this, back and forth, until the stranger and I hurt Father Gascoigne enough that he can’t hold onto his humanity any longer. The scourge overcomes him and he turns into a beast. He’s mindless and savage and more dangerous than ever. But the stranger seems to know exactly how to dodge Father Gascoigne’s swipes and lunges. The stranger knows exactly when to fight back and when to run. I follow his lead. We chip away at Father Gascoigne until, with a final slash, I put the beast down.

The stranger bows before turning to stardust and fading away. Beside Father Gascoigne, I find a key that opens the gate leading to the old church. Finally.

Bloodborne is one of my favourite games of recent years. It’s terrifying, difficult, and often opaque about what’s actually happening in the story, events that are awesome, dreadful and stupefying.

Progress requires effort, and a lot of it, because the odds are against you. The enemies are countless and merciless, and death (yours) is as frequent as breath. To earn fleeting moments of success and understanding, you need what psychologists call grit, resilience, or optimism: the determined pursuit of a goal despite failure or adversity. “Fall seven times, stand up eight,” as the Japanese proverb goes. As a player, you have to commit like a monk to the cycle of death and rebirth you’ll experience, and to all the frustration and learning that comes with it. The issue is what will break first: the game’s challenges or your resolve. Will you keep trying, or will you let go of your humanity and “rage-quit” like a beast?

If you ever feel such forced growth is too much for you to bear, you can give up. You can put the controller down and walk away. You can play something light like Candy Crush. But every time you consider throwing the game disc out the window, you remember the beasts and the irrational, pitchfork-wielding mobs who stumble through Yharnam looking for someone to blame. If you give up, you’ll become one of them. You don’t want to be one of the failures, the weak, the broken, the sheep. You want to be a game-difficulty hipster. You want to be strong, resilient, determined, heroic. You want revenge against the inhuman thing that killed you fifty times before, because every hard-earned victory is a religious experience. So you try again.

There are times when the odds seem too great. When that happens, you can reach out to other players and hope someone will jump into your world and help you. Admitting your weakness isn’t failure; the game designers put the Beckoning Bell in the game intentionally. When you’re alone, you’re outmatched. That’s when you need better tools, even if those tools are carried by other people.

One day, you’ll be one of those other people and you’ll help someone else along. You’ll be the lifeline that strangers hold on to. You’ll hear their bell and answer their call. And the more you help them, the stronger your character will become—in every sense of the word.

There isn’t any moment in Bloodborne when anyone takes you aside and gives you a pep talk about never giving up. There’s no sitcom-dad moment, no “very special episode”.

If anything, the people in the story are snide. They taunt you into quitting, and laugh at your mistakes. They hide truths and secrets, then mock you in their Cockney accents for your lack of knowledge. Even the real players you occasionally meet can only communicate with you through their characters’ body language.

You have to unravel the world’s mysteries yourself, just as you might have to while travelling in a foreign country without a guidebook. You’re the one who has to grow. You’re forced to manage your wild emotions and embody the resilience and cooperation the game indirectly preaches. You know other players have finished this game, so there must be a way. Maybe you need their help, or maybe you can figure it out on your own. Either way, you keep trying. Resilience is the greatest weapon you have.

As I played Bloodborne, I thought about how easy it was to summon help in facing the game’s greatest challenges. Thinking about how the game shares, experientially, its lesson about resilience in the face of hopelessness, I thought about what other lessons it might have to offer.

I even wondered, a bit childishly, why we can’t have a Beckoning Bell in real life. Where is the lifeline we can call when things are beyond human control? Because I’m a (conflicted) spiritual person, my mind drifted to prayer.

At least in my own tradition, Islam, prayer is supposed to be how we relate to the divine. It’s the prism through which we see the light, however fractured. And it is fractured. My spiritual life is filled with frustrating contradictions and unsatisfying rationalizations. Like a stubborn, resilient Bloodborne player, though, I keep working with those frustrations. I know what I’ll become if I give up.

The truth is I don’t know how prayer works. Whether I use the sacred Arabic verses or my own impromptu English ones, I say words, and they echo through my mind or through the realms of the universe, but do they have an effect? Does anyone hear? I’m meant to believe there’s a divine presence out there that hears my pleas: God alters the geometry and physics of the world to resolve my problems; angels fly down to shield me from drunk drivers. It’s all invisible, though.

As I write this, I feel very self-conscious about how it sounds. The whole thing feels silly. There’s a reason many religious people don’t like talking about the nitty-gritty of their faith. After all, I pronounce ancient words and read from old books the way wizards do in movies, and whether it’s my doing or a response from the divine, I expect something supernatural will happen. This is what I literally believe. I laugh at The Secret, but what I do isn’t functionally different. It’s just older.

Sometimes people talk about prayer (or The Secret) the way they talk about deadlifting or constipation: you just have to do it hard enough. I know, though, that prayer doesn’t work like that. Whether people pray the Montreal Canadiens will win their twenty-fifth Stanley Cup, or they pray they’ll reach the Turkish border and escape ISIS death squads, those prayers may be answered—but then again they may not be.

For prayer to work, it would need to be consistent, the same way that, when people call 911, an ambulance shows up. Even Bloodborne’s Beckoning Bell is more clear-cut. There isn’t always a stranger to help you, and summoning one doesn’t guarantee you’ll succeed, but at least the whole system is black and white.What if we lived in a world where we could pray, we could ring our own Beckoning Bell, and divine help was obvious and accessible? What if we could rely on prayer the way we rely on 911? Wouldn’t more people believe in God, then? Obviously, reality couldn’t function as we currently know it, especially if people prayed for mutually exclusive things. But God (being God) could make it work, and, as a result, we’d have a more direct and rich relationship with the force behind creation.

I suppose it’s a moot point.

In Bloodborne, you’re on a journey to unravel a mystery about the scourge of the beast—what caused it and how to cure it. There are others on the same path; you encounter these characters during your adventure. When you meet them, though, they aren’t full of aloof wisdom about the beastly nature inside the human heart. No, they’ve torn their eyes out and gone mad after pondering unfathomable questions or learning things humans were never meant to learn.

Back in the real world, we settle for unsatisfying axioms like “God works in mysterious ways.” It’s the equivalent of a parent telling their kids maybe they’ll go to the toy store later. It’s stalling, which is easier than putting up with an argument. And here I am, like a five-year-old: “But why?” and “Is it later yet?”

There was a time when ritual and ceremony felt more effective, when the causality wasn’t so mysterious. While spiritual behaviour goes back hundreds of thousands of years in our prehistoric past, I’m thinking of the way we acted in early civilizations like Sumer and Babylon. A priest would climb atop a ziggurat at the start of every new year to perform a sacrifice. The rituals they performed weren’t meant for private comfort, but to renew the covenant with the gods for another year. In doing so, they would keep the fragile accomplishment of civilization afloat among a sea of cosmic forces, many of which could be felt directly in the unpredictable natural world. Ritual was about direct material benefit. If people didn’t perform the rituals, the gods would take everything away with a drought, an earthquake, a storm, an eruption.

We don’t live in such a superstitious society anymore. Like the rest of our brain, our spirituality has evolved since its prehistoric roots. So why keep up the pretence? Why keep praying if it’s all a misplaced reaction to the baffling inconsistencies of life? Why bother if no dream-stranger will materialize in front of us and help us?

For the same reason we play games: praying feels good.

Sure, it’s not logical to believe in magic. But when it comes right down to it, it feels good to imagine magic exists.

I know that sounds irrational. It was Sigmund Freud who theorized that the belief in God was a vestigial childhood need for an all-powerful father figure. Freud thought we were all immature and that, like children, we all desperately wanted a hug. Even though he sometimes used mythic metaphors to explain his ideas, he was like other thinkers of the time. He had a materialist world view; abstract ideas required material proof to be considered valid. Emotions were infantile neuroses. Modern people were supposed to be dispassionate and stoic. They were supposed to be beings of pure will who could weather any storm alone, like a Bloodborne player who refuses to call for help.

Well, for one thing, most of Freud’s wacky ideas have been left behind by psychologists.

And even if they hadn’t been left behind, so what if we all just want a hug? So what if some of us cry at Pixar movies? Is that so wrong? You try watching the first five minutes of Finding Dory and not crying!

I’m not hyper-evolved enough to have moved beyond that. I’m not saying I’m going to start sending mystical chain letters, or teach kids that Jesus rode dinosaurs, or whatever. I’ve had a strong love of science and history since I was an immature child. Yet I also think it’s up to us to create the richness we want from the universe, and to approach life with playfulness. And that playful part of me wants to call out in the middle of the night and hope someone is listening. That part of me still wants to hope. Hope gets us through the darkest storms.

In Islam, we end our prayers on our knees. We cup our hands together and we whisper to God. We fill our hands with hope. Then we stand up. It’s not about the words, the logic, or even the result. It’s about the feeling, the act, the intention.

But I still wish I had a bell.

---

(Images 1–4 © Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC. Image 1 by SP17FIRE. Image 2 by Gosu Noob. Image 5 by Alma E. Guinness.)

(This post also appears on Medium.)

Close Your Eyes: a short story

A shooting star streaked through the clear mustard sky and burst apart, bombarding the plateau and the colony below with shrapnel. After a fragment with a bullet’s velocity shattered a dish on the colony’s communications tower, Arjun decided to climb the tower himself to repair the dish rather than pull construction drones away from their scheduled work.

He was glad to be out in the sunshine despite being encased in a suit. Tools in hand, he cursed in gangster’s Hindi every blasted committee that had okayed the sky-scraping eyesore he was now forced to repair. They wanted something ostentatious, a spire to pin flags to, but it was a foolish, vulnerable design for a tower. Yet, spiking out of the centre of the complex, it was perfectly at one with the colony’s oil-platform aesthetic: tubes and pipes and pre-fab cylinders welded together by the drills of drones.

Below, Kiran drove her buggy away, trailer in tow loaded with electrical-wire spindles and the spare parts Arjun didn’t need. With reception down, she hadn’t received the GCR and SEP simulation results for her next HeLa cell test, so she had volunteered to help him instead. But, if comms really would be down for—

Divots spit up around her: falling debris, pang-pang against the panelling of the colony. She looked up. Another meteor was pulling apart on entry. While she gawked, a blunt, airborne pebble struck her shoulder with the force of a cricket ball and knocked her halfway out the buggy’s side; her palm braced her against the butterscotch earth.

A contrail split the sky, and soon a flash came outside her peripheral vision, sunrise-bright, glancing. Through her helmet and the gauze of atmosphere, she heard the explosion only faintly, as if it were embarrassed. Then the ground shook. She fell completely out of the buggy, landed shoulder to the ground, then hobbled and turned to the direction of the flash. A sandstorm spread from what she assumed was an impact crater, lost in smoke thick as village gossip, out of which ejecta rose up in arcs. The air burned, as did the desert soil. Dust blew across her helmet’s visor and across the colony.

Victoria and Wilson radioed from the greenhouse in the Chinese half of the compound—concerned and seeking reassurance that they weren’t suddenly alone.

“What happened?” said Wilson. “Turn your helmet-cams on, please. Other cameras are blind. Over.”

“Another meteor fall,” said Kiran into her headset, turning against the wind. “Distance: two k-plus at Heading 289. Dust is—”

An animated infographic of Arjun’s vitals flashed suddenly in her HUD, red with panic. His pulse was wild, his BP plummeting. She looked up sixty feet to her husband in his space suit, harnessed midway along the frame of the tower. He was dangling limp beside the dish he’d been repairing.

“Arjun! Oh, God…”

She skipped to the base of the tower, found a strap and a magnet and a carabiner somewhere on herself or the tower or both, and climbed with an alpinist’s ease, up and then around him. He was slumped backward, balanced at his hip, starfish limbs open to the sky. His helmet had split open. The side of his suit was pierced and torn, leaving only sticky red and burnt black visible. Dust flew in. His blood, smeared along his exposed skin, began to vaporize. Part of his face was shorn.

“Arjun!”

He was unresponsive. Kiran turned her headlamp on and grabbed his jaw to look down his throat: he was gurgling blood. Even if she had supplies to intubate him, he would quickly suffocate on the air’s carbon dioxide and the impact’s dust. And, thanks to her fat-fingered gloves, she had little fine motor control. She craned around the dish for grip, trying to figure out how to… She let go of the tower and leaned back into her harness. Her hands free, she could now fumble with the ties of her gloves and take them off, even if they would freeze. Worry about that later.

“Arjun!”

“What the hell is going on, Kiran?” said Victoria over the headset. “Turn your cameras on! Over.”

Kiran flicked a switch on the side of her helmet to activate the stereoscopic cameras mounted there.

“Multiple puncture wounds, presuming from meteor fragments,” Kiran said. “He’s bleeding out.”

“Shit,” Victoria said.

“Come out here!” Kiran yelled, though she knew they could not simply run out of the airlock. Nor could she remove her gloves for fear her suit would decompress like his.

Arjun’s heart-rate monitor in her HUD was flaring like desperate Morse, and its tone blared. In the cold air, his skin was turning stiff and ashen. She could not free his airway, or cut away his suit to find all the wounds or put pressure on them, or defibrillate his arresting heart.

The tone finally became one long, uninterrupted squeal. Still, she pressed her hands together on his torso. She had no leverage but started chest compressions anyway. Do not surrender.

After some minutes—she didn’t know how many—she was too exhausted to continue. Her hands fell away from him and she hung there like he did.

Almost like him. He was different now.

She swiped the outside of her visor to dismiss the flat line and silence its tone, leaving a streak of blood that quickly caked dry. To keep from looking at it, she stared at the blank sky and listened to her breathing as if through a conch. Only listen to that.

“Kiran?”

She twisted to look below. Victoria and Wilson were at the foot of the tower. She had lost track of time, and hadn’t even called the time of death.

They waved once. Kiran swallowed a breath and waved back.

“I… I need help to bring him down.”

It was their fifty-sixth day on Mars.

There was protocol for this. The protocol was in binders. Everything was in binders.

Arjun Verma’s plastic-sealed binder indicated that he wanted a cremation and a “proper Hindu burial”, and no cameras. Kiran only managed a confused, ironic laugh, for in the confidentiality of a government form, he’d revealed something he hadn’t revealed to her—that there were still traces of belief in him. In her own binder, she’d written down “cremation” and something resembling an Air Force funeral, all because she assumed he had done the same. She didn’t even know what a proper Islamic burial looked like.

She washed him and did the autopsy for the paperwork. Six iridium shards had pierced his suit, severed major arteries and punctured vital organs, and killed him. He did not have a chance.

After dark, they put him in a compartment in the reactor built for corpses, and she huddled beside its door for hours, eyes shut tightly, a palm covering her mouth.

“It’s OK if you want to cry,” Victoria said.

“Or scream,” Wilson said.

“Oh, the wailing widow, eh?” Kiran said. “Will that make you feel better?”

They fell silent and made no further suggestions.

Finally, the reactor left her with piles of his charred remains. She somehow hoped for dust so she wouldn’t have to touch pieces of him, but she knew they still had to pulverize his remains to reduce his bones to something like ash. There were machines for this, usually used for breaking apart mined ore.

When the rollers had broken him apart, she scooped up the powder and soot and shovelled it bit by bit with one of Victoria’s gardening trowels and dumped it little by little into one of Wilson’s geological sample canisters. She twisted the lid shut. It had such large, simple knobs and handles, something even a colonist with insulated gloves could tighten.

“He wrote he wanted his—the ashes—to be ‘immersed in a river’,” Victoria read while Kiran stared at the metal canister.

Kiran harrumphed.

“His cheap sarcasm,” she said bitterly. “The man asks for a river on a desert planet.”

“So, um…” Victoria said.

Kiran sighed. She crunched up her face.

“I’m sorry,” Kiran said. “This is all…”

Victoria and Wilson looked over at each other.

“If we went to one of the gullies…” Victoria said, helpful.

“Maybe,” Wilson said, palming his own bald head as he thought out loud. “It’s fourteen k to the nearest one, though.”

Kiran looked at her watch. The sun would be up soon.

“Or, here’s another suggestion,” Wilson said. “I have data showing water ice under the impact crater is melting and pushing through to the surface. So, if you want to immerse—”

Kiran grabbed the canister and walked off.

“Yes, let’s go.”

Morning. The dust had fallen through the thin atmosphere; the sky above the Chryse Planitia plateau was clear again. Kiran Ali Khan, Victoria Cheung and Wilson Cheung stood in white space suits at the rim of the still-exhaling crater. The impact had carved out a feature on the life-denying plain. The bowl of the crater could fit a primary school’s football pitch, or, more worryingly, the entire colony. Metallic fragments had been blasted in mosaic across the blackened pit, refracting their iridescence despite dust and steam.

Kiran stood, the sample canister clipped to her waist, and waited as Wilson took readings with his Geiger counter; he paced with measured steps around the rim. Victoria, meanwhile, took notes on her tablet and recorded helmet-cam video she would post later—after they finished repairing the communications tower.

Kiran stared. The ice vapour seethed and hushed as it escaped the soil. Her fishbowl breaths punctuated the steam’s ascent, and her breaths fought to push past constricted muscles. She rocked her jaw to keep it from clenching like her fists.

Incoming voice transmission, her HUD read. Open channel? She looked up. Wilson gave her a quaint, American thumbs-up. Kiran waved, then opened her communications channel.

Approaching the edge of the crater, she traced by sight the path she would take. Then, her right foot crossed over the rim and set down inside the crater.

“Bismillah,” she caught herself mouthing unexpectedly, how her grandfather had whenever he lifted himself out of his nap-time sofa and set a foot on the floor. Strange.

When she was eleven, her grandparents had gone for Hajj. All Kiran had known about it then was that they were running around in some far-off backwater. When her grandparents returned to Chandigarh, Kiran’s parents listened politely to their trip anecdotes because they had to. While they all sat in the living room, Kiran eavesdropped from the hallway, playing on her iPad. Her grandparents wondered why Kiran and her parents didn’t pray, and wouldn’t it be fantastic if Kiran learned to read Qur’an. She winced at the thought, then tiptoed back to her bedroom, around the geography of creaks in the parquetry, and gently pushed her door closed. She started doing her homework, of all things, if only to appear too busy and studious for her grandparents’ crotchety aspirations. Their Twentieth Century airs were unbearable, and their attempts to lure her into the faith had been transparent. They’d told her about a stone that had fallen from the heavens to mark the spot where the Kaaba should be built. To make the mythology sound more scientific they called the stone a “meteorite”.

According to her lapsed beliefs, meteorites came from Paradise to mark holy land. So, it was a reflex to invoke the name of God when she stepped into the crater. Fine, no arguments. But then she crouched to pick up a dull, black metal pebble in the pinch of her fingers. She looked up at the place from where the meteor had come, as if it had fallen from a shelf. The featureless sky offered no explanation. These things drop in uninvited from somewhere else. They come of their own volition.

“What is that?” Victoria said, approaching.

Kiran stood and raised the nugget up to Victoria’s helmet-cams.

“More iridium,” Kiran said, brushing it as best she could with stubby fingers until it reflected hues. She let it fall, then prodded the ground further with her foot. Stable. Interlocked hand-to-wrist, Kiran and Victoria crouched along the sloping wall, a crunch of fresh glass granules under each step, and they descended into the bowl of mist. They made for the mound of rebounded earth at the centre of the crater, out of which black stone jutted. The sides of the crater overtook the horizon. Kiran knelt to hastily scoop away a burial spot and unclipped the canister. But, as she was about to twist its lid open, she hesitated, then stopped altogether.

The vapour beaded and froze upon their suits. The cameras recorded. Kiran was in a stupor, looking at the hole.

“Kiran?” Victoria said.

She looked up at Victoria with a confused squint, and shook her head. When Victoria reached out with a comforting hand, Kiran bristled.

“OK, OK,” Victoria said, pulling her hand back diplomatically. “Take your time.”

Kiran held the canister, and didn’t move until she wiped her forearm across her wet, frosting visor. She still stared into the hole.

“Uh, maybe we could come back tomorrow,” Victoria finally said. “We could always do that. If you’re not ready.”

Kiran nodded, though she knew it would not be any easier the next day. She clapped her palms free of dirt and walked away.

There was too much to do. The tower was damaged, as were solar cells on the drone bay, and piping from the filtration shed, and, and, and. There wasn’t any time to sleep, Kiran said, though Victoria and Wilson suggested she should—let them handle the repairs. They even accused her of being in a state of shock, but she knew her own body, she knew what shock was, and she resented their pop psychology and their pity. None of them had slept, Kiran argued, so why should she be the only one to rest?

Despite the progress they made on the repairs, by day’s end the link to the satellite relay was still only come and go. It was the best they could do without parts from Earth—a few weeks away via nuclear rocket—so Wilson and Victoria decided it was good enough for the moment; they were all exhausted. They joined Kiran for dinner in the Indian module, hoping she would want to talk, but she was quiet. They finally turned in for the night, leaving Kiran to do the same.

After chai, Kiran fidgeted in her weighted bodysuit and lay disagreeably in a hammock with a tablet, wishing for a sofa. There was barely room in their pre-fab bunker to stretch, let alone room for such luxury. Irritated, she rolled out and paced in search of distraction, then found herself standing at a porthole looking out at the night, palm cupped against the glass. The lights were dim around the Chinese half of Centenary Base. Only the intermittence of the red beacon atop the transmission tower gave any sign of life.

She looked back at her tablet. Fifty-eight thousand messages of condolence had come through on the overnight data package. The first few hundred messages she’d already read implied she must have been feeling so guilty about failing to save Arjun—as if the Air Force hadn’t weaned her off self-doubt a long time back. Meanwhile, the friendships that had long been reduced to group chats full of emoji, Bollywood gossip, and mom-blog clickbait offered only hastily typed condolences, one-liners, as if auto-completed. As for Arjun’s mother, she was hysterical in the video message she sent, threatening to commit suicide or murder or both. And there were only contradictory platitudes from her own parents: “Take rest. Time will heal. Be strong. They depend on you.”

They: India. They were experiencing a collective paroxysm. “End of innocence for the Generation,” read one of the most-shared editorials. “After all our hope, this.” When the press weren’t eulogizing, they were speculating about when New Delhi would schedule the state funeral, and how that might be coordinated between the two planets. Meanwhile, some minister had already commissioned a memorial statue, and a sculptor had been hired, and bronze had been ordered.

Then there were calls for a formal enquiry. Why was the tower constructed in such a vulnerable way? Why had the orbital missile-defence system not detected the inbound meteoroids as threats? Why were the colonists’ gloves—particularly those of the mission doctor—not designed with an emergency release mechanism? Why didn’t she have a trauma kit? Why didn’t she lower Cmdr Verma from the tower and bring him inside to treat him? Was Kiran Ali Khan even the most qualified medical officer they could have included in the First Four? What damning details would her past performance evaluations reveal?

To hell with all of them, she thought.

Well, no. She would have to upload a thank-you video, at least. The stoic widow, resilient, graceful, and poised. Hmph.

Meanwhile, the nearby treadmill was quiet. Normally, Arjun was gymming on it after dinner, paranoid about muscle atrophy.

“Remember to take your GreyGu,” Kiran always reminded him. Accelerating into a jog, he’d only answer with huffing and panting. He would be too busy seeing Aaradhya Bachchan in another one of her overwrought dramas on his tablet.

Kiran made for the medicine locker, where she found the plastic GreyGu bottle. She swallowed two of its silvery pills of nanites with a mouthful of recycled water. That would resolve her tension headache and all the soreness.

She slid under bulkheads on her way back to her hammock, and picked up her tablet to update her mission log. Slumping into the mesh, she drew a breath to draw a thought, then wrote:

Visited impact crater. Cmdr Vicky Cheung recorded video. Remarkable, almost an ancient amphitheatre, but mind was elsewhere. Remembered Dada-ji for some reason.

She lifted her fingers, feeling a rush of sentimentality, and held her tablet against herself, and turned her head into the net, the headache only getting worse. She rubbed her temples. Let the pills do their work.

When she realized she was falling asleep, she pulled herself out of the hammock. Time to send her meagre log on its five-and-a-half minute journey home, then turn in. She checked the tablet’s network connection: Network inactive. She rubber-banded the menu. Refresh. Refresh. Nothing. She set her tablet to sleep.

Kiran stood at the crater’s edge, looking for a proper spot to bury the remains. The water had evaporated since the previous day.

Wilson collected preliminary samples with Victoria’s help. Only after the repairs were complete would he be able to spend more time collecting soil and rock samples and making topographical measurements. Two months in and the crater’s wide black bowl was the first monumental thing they’d seen. They still only called it “the crater”; the team back home was still deciding on the appropriate mythological name.

Back home: the immigrant’s reflex.

“So?” Victoria said to Kiran. Victoria and Wilson had loaded up the buggy to his satisfaction.

“If you don’t mind,” Kiran said, “I want to do it alone.”

Wilson and Victoria looked at each other.

“I was hoping to record something to send back,” Victoria said. “They keep asking about when we’re going to do it.”

“I don’t want an elaborate spectacle,” Kiran said.

It was a ludicrous thing to say, she knew, considering the entire colonization mission was a spectacle framed by two nations’ centenary celebrations. And the surveillance satellites were always recording.

“He wanted a private ceremony,” Kiran said. “I have to give him that.”

“So, what do we tell—”

“Don’t tell them anything. I’ll speak to them.”

Victoria nodded, pressed Kiran’s padded shoulder and turned to the buggy with Wilson. They topped up Kiran’s oxygen before driving back, leaving her alone at rim of the crater, legs limp along the sloping wall, arms buttressed behind her, the canister and a trowel waiting beside her.

After a few minutes, she twisted to look behind herself. Victoria and Wilson were long gone, out of headset range. No Signal flashed in Kiran’s HUD. Searching for network… A distressing ellipsis; the icon’s animated radio waves rippled out endlessly. Dead air. Even the spray of dust from Wilson and Victoria’s buggy had settled.

Deciding it was safe, Kiran turned back to the crater. She waited until her breath slowed into permission, then raised upturned palms—that was how her grandparents had done. She held her hands by her chest, held them close. Some vestigial memory suggested she should look into her hands with demure eyes, say something earnest or profound, then blow on them with quivering breath, but her air wouldn’t get past the visor. She waited and waited for the right words. The pneumatic valves of her oxygen regulator flushed and swelled. She looked down at the canister, but didn’t open it.

OT question to any Muslim commenters: prayer. How it’s done? ‘Foxhole conversion’, perhaps, ha ha. My family were never for that sort of thing. ARKHIVE has too many conflicting infos, Arabic terminology. Need diploma in religion to make sense of it! Have been thinking about it, with everything going on. Thx. TTFN.

Sometime after midnight, Kiran headed to the shower. When she finished, Arjun was not there. Normally, he was lying there stone dead, breathing like a stray dog, and she could never sleep with that going on. This peace and quiet were no better, though, and all around her were his things. She’d begun sifting through them and consigning things to piles: re-use, recycle, keep, bin. They were annexing the bedroom, the hallways, the kitchen, the floor, the shelves. She had to get out. No point waiting or standing on ceremony any longer.

Anyway, her query on the mission stream had only invited trollish nonsense. The commenters mentioned ridiculous folklore, like the rumour that Neil Armstrong had heard the Islamic call to prayer on the Moon after performing the Christian communion in the lander with Aldrin. Others called her a “Hindu-fucking whore”, and said her ignorance was proof of a Sino-Indian conspiracy to mock Islam. The ultra-nationalists, meanwhile, were fuming because the first Indian couple should have been entirely Hindu, and now there wasn’t even a single “true” Indian up there, let alone two.

Then there were the pedants who shouted back alien things, telling her that, unless she faced Mecca precisely, her sudden and insincere prayers would be invalid, but because the two planets were in constant motion it would all be impossible, and if she were really a Muslim, she would never have relocated to a place where should could not align herself with Mecca, and therefore her question was yet more proof that—

She stopped checking. She could only trust her own devices. Find a way. Be Exceptional.

After pre-breathing pure oxygen for an hour, she donned her space suit. She clipped the canister to her waist, passed through the airlock, and walked to the edge of the oasis carved out by the colony’s lights. Nothing was visible beyond them except the canopy of ancient stars. With a finger-tap on her visor’s HUD, she turned on her night vision. It bored a hole ahead of itself, even if the night resisted like a dam. She turned to Heading 289, wondering if the crater would feel different in the dark than it did in the light.

One foot dragged ahead of the other, skimming across the dirt cautiously to the place she could not see. Her boot caught a stone. She lost her balance. She fell visor-first onto another large rock, and her face whiplashed into the helmet’s inside edge. Dazed, she rolled sideways onto a bed of pebbles. She gulped air into bullfrog cheeks, and in a panic crawled back to the light, looking cross-eyed at the spot on her visor where she had fallen. Her lungs gave, but the engineered polycarbonate of her visor did not, even as the HUD projections sparked and flickered off. She tramped back into the airlock, fired the decontamination foam over her suit, then removed her helmet and welcomed the air in gasps.

Apparently her suit was invincible, unlike his. There was only a nick where the visor had met the rock. She rubbed it with her thumb but it would not go away. She smashed it with the edge of a fist, but it remained, defiant, while she relented. What a pitiful, mawkish display by the Exceptional Generation. She flung the helmet to the corner, then lowered her head between her knees. She shook like her pulse.

CAPCOM (02:38)Cmdr Ali Khan, satellite surveillance footage shows you making an unscheduled egress from the habitation module at 02:05, local time, leading to an accident. The module security feeds are still incomplete given the transmission problems, but our other data do not indicate any justification for the egress. Please explain your action and report on your condition.

Kiran Ali Khan (06:48) Just woke up. Thank you for your concern about my safety. Took a minor misstep, but am no worse for wear. Will be more careful next time.

CAPCOM (07:09) Please explain the purpose of your action of 02:05. There is no need to hide anything.

Kiran Ali Khan (07:49) Went for a stroll of a personal nature toward the crater.

CAPCOM (08:10) I caution you to refrain from further “strolls” at that hour. We need no further negative attention on the mission. (On a related note, we have closed comments on your stream.) Also, as you now seem to be replying, let us expedite arrangements for the funeral. Prime Minister’s office have a list of requests, not least of which are date and time.

Kiran Ali Khan (08:32) You “caution” me? Is that an order?

Kiran Ali Khan (09:05)Well?

“Where is the gully?” Kiran said to Wilson, who sat alongside Victoria with four tablets in Arjun’s operations room. He held up one finger and didn’t look up from the screens. His headset left him with only one free ear.

“I need the coordinates,” Kiran said.

She stood by, arms akimbo. Wilson pulled and pinched on the tablets and fed vectors to the excavators, bulldozers and cranes at the job site: the eighty-couple settlement they had to erect in time for the next close approach, two years away, well after both sponsoring nations had celebrated their centenaries.

Wilson swivelled the mic away from his mouth and turned to Kiran, but still held on to a tablet.

“Sorry, what?” he said. “The gully?”

“You said there was a gully fourteen kilometres away. I’m going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be dense,” she said. “I’m burying his remains there.”

“Dense?” Victoria repeated, annoyed.

“What about the crater?” he said.

“No. It won’t do.”

She didn’t elaborate. Wilson squinted at her sceptically.

“That’s all?” he said.

“I don’t want to bury him beside the thing that killed him. Is that acceptable?”

“It was an innocent question,” Victoria said.

Kiran stared back: Vicky, butt out.

“Fine,” Wilson said. “But you keep going off the grid by yourself when comms is still up and down. It’s not wise.”

“Then you come with me, Surveyor General,” Kiran said. “Two seats on the buggy, and you know the directions.”

“No,” Victoria protested weakly.

“You can stay here just in case,” Kiran said to Victoria.

“Kiran, you don’t need directions,” Wilson said. “You drive in a straight line and end up in the alcove. Then you hike, and the alcove narrows into a channel.”

“How far of a hike?”

“I don’t recall exactly. Maybe a few hundred metres—”

“Fantastic. I am going, then.”

“Kiran,” Wilson said.

She stopped, only turning her head sideways to her shoulder.

“What is it?” she said.

“Wait for me. Don’t rush into this yourself.”

“I…” She stammered and narrowed her eyes. She faced him. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said don’t rush into this.”

“Eh, you don’t think I’ve waited long enough?”

“I don’t think waiting has anything to do with it.”

“Oh, you are so wise, you self-righte—”

She shut her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose, and let out a sigh.

“I apologize,” she said. She looked into him, and huffed half words, snatching, exasperated. “I don’t want any of this.”

“I understand,” he said, nodding. He set his tablet down on the brushed-metal desk. “Look, I’ll go with you, just… We’re already so far behind with everything that’s happened. Let’s just get the approval from ‘upstairs’.”

“It’s three hours,” she said, “or four.”

“I’m not arguing that, Kiran. But they still want us to meet the targets, and we’re having trouble picking up where Arjun left off.”

“He didn’t ‘leave off’.”

“That’s not… If I drop everything for three hours… Maybe if you ask them, they’ll take it more seriously.”

“I’m asking you,” she said. “I don’t need to ask them.”

He lifted a tablet and fanned it in her direction.

“They keep pestering us about arrangements for some grand state funeral,” he said. A weedy, self-deprecating smile wrapped itself around a bureaucratic tone. “You said you would talk to them. They just sent me a strongly worded memo—”

“Dafa ho jao,” she cursed, walking out. “I’m going by myself. You needn’t cover for me.”

“Kiran!” Victoria shouted at the hallway. “Message them!”

At that, Kiran did an about-turn and marched back into Arjun’s old office.

“Take some damned initiative,” she said to Wilson. “This is important.”

He nodded, flustered.

“I know. Everything’s piling up, and—”

“OK, you can check the schedule and tell me.”

She leaned against the doorframe with crossed arms, settling in like furniture. He shook his head and ummed and ahhed and picked up a tablet, skimmed fingers across checker-boarded schedule blocks, then set the tablet down.

“I will,” he said, “but we’re busy at the moment.”

She nodded sideways. Wilson swivelled back to the desk. Victoria fanned through a binder on drone maintenance. Kiran walked back to the lab, where her centrifuges spun away.

An hour past the blue sunrise. Kiran drove, and the driving was bad. Rocks of all sizes were littered across the undeveloped plain, and she never pushed past ten kilometres per hour. Wilson sat beside her in the roofless buggy. The spare tanks of oxygen clinked behind them, only felt, scarcely heard.

“Are you all right?” he said, thinking of the canister with the remains of Arjun.

“First class.”

Kiran turned the steering abruptly. Wilson grabbed the roll cage to brace himself.

“Are you sure?” he said.

Kiran grumbled.

“You’re very persistent,” she said.

“Hmm,” he muttered. He was trying not to fall out.

“They want you to keep a rein on me,” Kiran said, “don’t they?”

“They who? HQ?”

“Yes.”

“I came along for you,” he said.

“I would have gone by myself.”

“And with this driving, you wouldn’t have come back.”

She discovered a smile in the middle of her mood.

“So, now,” she said, “there will be two bodies in a ditch somewhere instead of one. Or should I say three instead of two…”

“No,” he said, “you shouldn’t.”

They arrived at the apron of the gully an hour and a quarter after departure. First, more oxygen. Then, with the canister clasped to her belt, Kiran hiked up the gentle slope with Wilson, following the delta of the apron for two hundred metres until it narrowed into a channel a few metres wide. He stopped and felt the ground.

“Here?” she said.

“I’m just examining the sediments in the soil,” he said. “You go. I’ll be here.”

She waved him over.

“You’ve come this far, Wilson, so…”

He nodded, stood, and followed her. Together, they walked another hundred metres until they were a third of the way to the top of the slope where the run-off from the ancient melts had poured down. Those melts had cut a swath four metres deep into the soil.

“Here,” she declared.

Wilson waited, but she didn’t move. She only stared into the channel. The sunlight hadn’t found its way to the bottom yet. Too early. She breathed coarsely, and the static crunched into Wilson’s ear. At last, she counted the time by her HUD’s oxygen gauge as if it were a watch. It knew how many breaths she had left, and now so did she. On with it. With his help, she lowered herself halfway down the incline of the channel. She dug into the darker soil. And when she had dug a pit a foot deep, she twisted the canister open, looked at the flakes inside, and poured them into the ground. She stared, and, before she could stop herself, she shoved in dirt to fill up the hole.

She looked at the mound of disturbed soil, and patted it with one palm. Then she laid her second hand beside the first, there upon him, and lowered her head until her visor pressed into the soil. There, against the mound, she closed her eyes and whispered. Then she sat up, brought her fingertips against her visor, kissed the air between them and her lips, and patted the soil again.

When she looked up, she met Wilson’s eyes while crying freely through hers. He crouched against the edge and offered his hand. She took it and climbed out, and slumped against the ridge of the channel. There was no way to blow her nose behind her visor, so she sniffled sharply. She heard Wilson groan as he eased himself down onto the ridge a respectful distance away from her.

Her arms were perched on her knees, in front of her, hanging there. She didn’t move and she didn’t say anything. Instead, facing the gully, she at last raised cupped palms near her face. Her eyelids dropped, and her lips moved silently for a few minutes. Then she heaved a sigh and ran her palms against her visor as if she were rinsing her face. She lowered her hands and sat still. Her limbs tingled as if choked by tourniquets.

“Kiran?” Wilson said.

She turned her head. She sniffled and sighed.

“You were…” he said. “It looked like you were praying.”

She nodded.

“Something like that.”

“I’m so unfamiliar with Islam,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to…” He mimed, flattening his hands against an imaginary floor.

She cleared her throat.

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m only learning. Going through docs in ARKHIVE slowly.”

“You did that bowing on the… Where you buried him… His remains.”

She sighed.

“Maybe so,” she said. “Probably it seemed odd.”

“No…”

“Well, it all feels a bit odd,” she said. She took a breath. “Actually… Actually, it doesn’t feel odd. I know I’m meant to say it does, though.”

“Does it help?”

An anxious laugh contracted in her chest. She thought about the question for a moment.

“I am still trying to answer that myself,” she said. “I only keep asking unfair and impossible questions, and I don’t hear any answer. Maybe the silence counts as an answer. So, that is helping—the quiet is helping. And…” She waited for her lips and chin and jaw to settle. “…I don’t know what else to do.” She flexed her fingers to bring the feeling back. “And it feels closer to what he wanted.”

“Close, or closer?”

“Closer. Closer than the anthem, and standing at attention, and saluting the flag.”

Wilson nodded.

“You know,” Kiran said, “a few more degrees one way or the other, and that meteor would have… It would have been a grand state funeral for all of us, like Mars One.”

“Don’t say that,” Wilson said, his hand restless as if looking for wood to knock on.

“Oh, it isn’t politic of India’s Exceptional Generation to talk about the Centenary Project like that, is it? We could lift the nation to Mars, but to suggest we might end up like the Americans—comms blackout, a little smear—”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Wilson said. “It’s a bit morbid, even under the circumstances.”

He toggled a switch on the side of his helmet, fast but as conspicuous as an amateur magician.

Kiran stared him up and down like he was leprous.

“You’re recording this?” Kiran said.

“No,” Wilson said. Not anymore.

“Why? I said I didn’t want a spectacle.”

“No, that’s not… Never mind.”

He looked away, self-conscious, but Kiran walked over to him and, standing as close as a dog’s master, grabbed his shoulder. Look at me.

“You’re recording it for HQ.”

“Kiran…”

“So you can show them what I’m doing? Because the satellite view… ‘Off the grid’—that’s what you said.”

“I turned it off,” Wilson said.

“Are you streaming it to the server?” she said.

“How? Reception isn’t—”

“Then delete that recording.”

“I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t even… They want to be sure it doesn’t turn political.”

“Oh, yes, keep things neutral and safe. No risk of me inflaming sectarian sentiment and ruining the national day of mourning, the hero-worshipping, the myth—unless the footage is unfortunately leaked, right? Then they have a scapegoat.”

He sighed.

“What do you want me to say?” he said. “I’m not getting into conspiracy theories, Kiran. They just want closure.”

“Well, I don’t,” she said. She sniffled back mucus she couldn’t otherwise blow out. “I want to explain something to you.”

He waited for her. She paced, then stopped as if she had something to say, then finally found a spot beside him to sit. She looked at him, and he looked back. Her eyes turned to find a memory.

“There is an example I can think of, from my residency,” she said.

She closed her eyes, remembered, and then opened them.

“I was stationed at the hospital,” she said, “and we would go on rounds: visit the patients, order some examinations. Then, the orderlies would move a patient out of their room for a CT scan, MRI, et cetera. And as the orderlies pushed them around—the beds had wheels—”

“I know.”

“—the patients would go through the corridors, and other doctors and nurses and visitors were streaming in and out. And we… Normally, we walked up to the patients, and we helped ourselves to their bodies, to their blood vessels, to their stool samples. We delivered their food and we took it away. I was catching myself using a slow, condescending tone with them—not ‘Sir’ but ‘Siiiir’ or ‘Lieu-ten-nant’—if they complained about not having enough information, or if they became restless and made a fuss. ‘It’s for your own good,’ like we were speaking to children. I’m sure you’ve been in that situation.”

“Yes. Vicky’s mother.”

“And sometimes the patients… I would see them going by… The orderlies were pushing them, and they—the patients—would have their eyes closed as they were being pushed around in the corridors. In the middle of the day, even. It’s… That was the only way they could have the smallest shred of privacy: closing their eyes. Not letting anyone else see, at least for the few minutes when they were being carted about to and from Radiology. They lie there, and someone behind them is pushing their bed, they are only passengers, and others walk by and look down on them—literally and figuratively. Unless they close their eyes. Then we have to respect their privacy.”

He drew a slow breath. When he didn’t say anything, Kiran continued.

“There are some things we should have the right to not surrender,” she said. “For God’s sake, I’m sending them labs on our every bowel movement. They’re waiting impatiently to see which one of us develops cancer first. Our every utterance is dissected like some lost letter of George Mallory’s. So, let me have something that is mine.”

“I can understand that,” Wilson said, “but you know that analogy isn’t one-to-one applicable to us. We aren’t patients.”

She stood up and looked down the slope to the buggy. She turned to Wilson.

“I just put Arjun in the ground. I don’t care about the rest.”

Kiran heard Victoria shuffle in cautiously, apologetically, and Kiran picked up the scent of cardamom and cinnamon steaming in with the fresh cup of tea.

“It’s right here,” Victoria said. The mug clacked as she set it down on the small metal nightstand—more of a foot locker, really. When Victoria sat down on the edge of the bed, Kiran felt herself sink a bit deeper into the mattress. She was curled up like a foetus, and faced away from the door and the nightstand. She didn’t open her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice hoarse. “It smells so nice.”

“No problem,” Victoria said. Victoria didn’t touch her.

“Could I ask you for a favour, Vicky?”

“Of course.”

“Press my legs?”

Victoria shot a breath, a soft laugh, relief.

Kiran wobbled lifelessly as Victoria turned and settled into a comfortable position. And then Kiran felt Victoria’s hands, warm from the mug, kneed her muscles. She knew touch would now be brief, and only as frequent as comets and only on socially acceptable occasions, as on the successful repair of telecommunications dishes.

Her breathing sharpened, and she felt she was choking, and her face was wet again, and then her lungs buckled. She cried as loud as she could. Victoria seemed shocked—she had stopped rubbing Kiran’s legs, at least for a moment. Her hands pressed against Kiran’s shoulders and arms instead. Kiran turned and wrapped herself around Victoria’s waist, and jerked and convulsed as the cries muffled between the side of Victoria and the mess of sweaty sheets.

Kiran followed the trail of boot prints up the slope beside the gully. Where the trail stopped, she looked down, and there she saw the mess she had made and covered up. Beside it, along the ridge, she began piling rocks into a cairn, but stopped when she saw a line of flame strike the dark morning sky like a match. When the burning went out, a drogue chute emerged from the trailing end of a long cylinder. The cylinder split into six pods, each one carried by its own chute and protected by a layer of airbags: this week’s cargo drop from Earth. The pods landed three or four kilometres from the colony—the most accurate drop so far. HQ’s aim was getting better even as the planets were inching apart. Kiran knew she would need to drive back soon to help Wilson and Victoria retrieve the booty. It would not include anything for the repairs—that shipment was still six weeks away. But they would receive other scheduled supplies to help snowball the colony’s self-sufficiency: more dried food and medicine, emergency fuel rods for the reactors, batteries and tires for the buggies, cutter heads for the mining drones, nutrient-rich soil for the greenhouses. And, if memory served, the paan and namak paras Arjun had put in requisitions for.

Kiran finished piling the fist-sized stones into an irregular stack. It seemed prehistoric or archaeologically significant, not quite the geometric pyramid she’d intended, and she didn’t know how to make it better. Arjun was the engineer. Certainly, she could spend more time on it until she received some intuition that the cairn was “just right”. Then again, she simply did not feel like carrying on with it. There was a marker now, and it was done, and it amounted to an ugly pile of rubble next to a ditch, but its ugliness did not diminish her love.

No, it was not quite done. She placed a palm atop the cairn. Her breathing slowed as she waited for magnanimous words, but she also knew no one prayer could be enough. And, actually, she felt she should grab the top stone and smash it into the pile to break everything. Instead, she wrapped a fist around the stone, picked it up, and launched it far away with a force that tweaked a muscle in her shoulder. As the stone floated off, she glared at it and cursed it for being so lousy that it could not fly farther in this weak gravity.

Not feeling any better, she panted, leaned forward with her hands on her knees, then knelt beside the cairn and closed her eyes. Let it be incomplete, and me, too. Let him be safe now, and me, too. And let him see through my eyes the things he should have lived to see, what we sacrificed all for.

She opened her eyes. Around her were gullies carved eons ago by melting ice, and the horizon line they trained fourteen years to see, and the chalky trail in the sky behind the pods, and, closer than all that, her fingers powdered with rust, the same fingers he used to kiss whenever he apologized for the stupid things he said.

A transmission eventually came through her headset, choppy from low bandwidth.

“Kiran? …are you? Ov—”

“Wilson?” she said. “Come in. Over.”

“Drop came…are you? We’re just now…to ‘pick up the kids’.”

Pick up the kids: Arjun’s tired joke, now their shared vocabulary. It eased her into a smile.

She stretched, got up, and walked down the sandy slope to the buggy. She did not let herself look back at the cairn.

“On my way,” she said as she walked. “Over.”

Header image and footer image by Tim de Groot.

This story also appears on Wattpad and Medium.

How to lose a mountain: the peaks and pitfalls of exploration, near and far

It was called the Plain of Six Glaciers, which sounded like something in a Tolkien novel, what with his Battle of the Five Armies, or the Cracks of Doom, or, like, the entire Silmarillion. I stared up into the mountains at the supposed location of the mythical plain. The distant plateau was hidden by peaks and the sunlight shone from behind them.

I was in Alberta in the fall of 2012 for a two-week fiction-writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. It was a place where artists could develop their craft with mentors and peers. Every day, I had lunch in the cafeteria with other writers, and also with poets, composers and pianists. And, of course, I wrote and rewrote a project I was reviewing with my mentor.

Midway through the two-week residency, a group of us from the writing program planned to head up to Lake Louise, about an hour north of Banff. We piled into a chartered old school bus suited only for children. Tiny, tiny children. Was I ever that small? My adult legs couldn’t fit in those seats unless I sat like a 90-year-old man in a fishing village who complained about the catch. But like a schoolboy, I remembered the different types of triangles, and noticed, as I squeezed into those seats, that my legs formed an obtuse angle. That didn’t help the soreness from a small hike I’d done two days before beside the Banff Centre.

We arrived at Lake Louise, where one of the grand old railway hotels still stood. It was a bright and sunny day, though at ten in the morning, it was not quite ten degrees Celsius. It was the end of September, and the winter snows would come soon and, when they did, the path up into the mountains would be closed until the following spring. I stared up past the turquoise water of the lake, daunted by the mountain range behind it.

Others in the Banff group were readying for the hike, but I said I would be content walking around the lake like a mere tourist. I wrapped a scarf around my neck to look like a 1920s aviator; I only wanted to look like I could have an adventure. The walk around the lake would take 30 or 40 minutes, and I would turn back at the trailhead leading up into the mountains. I wanted to sit by the turquoise lake with a hot chocolate and a book.

I walked with some of the other writers in the residency, a gaggle of maybe a dozen of us, some more determined than others. I was at the rear of the pack with two others, and we talked about writing and literature and inspiration, the kind of thing I presumed Hemingway did between trout fishing and an afternoon bullfight. We talked and walked and it seemed like the best thing to do would be to keep doing that, to be a writer in the world with other writers, no matter where my footsteps led.

We arrived at the trailhead. The trail snuck into the wilderness, and the pavement gave way to trampled, brown grass and scattered branches and the occasional pile of caribou dung. The rise into the mountains was subtle, deceptive. The wilderness and the conversation both slowly tricked me into walking further away from the lake. As we hiked, we talked less and breathed more, and negotiated the trail’s twists and curves, the rocks and the fallen trunks, the mud and the mountain ice. There was a thought of heading up to a place called the Teahouse, which wasn’t quite as far up as the Plain of Six Glaciers or the dwarven army I assumed lived up there. Besides, a spot of tea among the mountains sounded delightful. We were already well on our way, and the trail up to the Teahouse was only be 5.5 km from the trailhead. I couldn’t tell how far we’d gone or how much further we had left, so I kept walking.

The pack ahead had disappeared from sight, up the trail. My two conversation partners, meanwhile, turned around one after the other, the first from asthma, and the other from a sore knee. They were fine but tired, and encouraged me to keep going. I said I had nothing to prove, but I realized I suddenly did—or rather, that I wanted to continue the hike. The hike had become epic and manly and beautiful, so I kept walking. Winding through the boreal forests, over the fresh or dried patties of caribou dung, across uneven rocks and the drip of melting ice, along trails where I tiptoed like a mountain goat by the edges of ravines, I could only keep going. The air was fresh, as if newborn, not old in the world. And though I needed that air, my muscles seemed not to ache. The sun rose overhead, warming me, and I was proud. And with fit young parents dragging their mewling toddlers up the mountain, stopping seemed bad form.

I arrived at the Teahouse around 1:00 or 1:30, three hours after departing from the Château Lake Louise. The plateau was covered in conifers older than me, and the Teahouse was little more than an old mountain shack with percolators and half-empty bags of Tostitos. It was all they had left then, at the end of September, and they were closing up shop for the season, before the mountain trails disappeared under the snowfall. Other hikers milled about eating granola bars and taking pictures next to trees the size of high rises.

I was tempted to go on up to the Plain of Six Glaciers. I had made it that far, and another 1.5 km to the plain seemed nothing, and probably Gandalf would be there smiting the Balrog’s ruin on the mountainside. I had to see that. The problem, though, was time. My trek up had been steady but slow, and I had to turn around if I wanted to catch the afternoon bus back to Banff. I stayed at the Teahouse for all of five minutes.

The descent was a lot faster than I expected, and easier, and therefore more enjoyable. Motion on the trail was so pure a thing, only muscle and breath, no spectre of thoughts or emails or pop culture. All the way down, I had a view of the moraine valley carved by the now-receding glacier that poured into Lake Louise. With my Joseph Aboud scarf around my neck, with the blood pumping through my arteries giving my masculine body life, with the brilliant sun above, I was euphoric.

Exhausted but still breathing (heavily), I arrived at the Château Lake Louise around 3:00, having completed the 12 km roundtrip unexpectedly early. I felt that tremble in my muscles that’s both scary and exhilarating: “What’s happening to me…and why the hell doesn’t it happen to me more often?” I was famished. I had just enough time to meet up with others in the group and have a fantastic, massive burger at the overpriced restaurant-bar in the bowels of the hotel. Sweet potato fries. A tall glass of Coke. A few blissful moments of European football on the big screen before they switched it to American football. Trembling.

I idealized Banff as a nexus more connected to nature, a place that was closer to the truth of the universe. It was surrounded on all sides by monumental things: the mountains, the sky. It was also a pricey resort town, but I imagined they built an artist’s campus there for a reason. I told myself that, like Himalayan monks, we retreated to the mountains to immerse ourselves in what mattered most. Being in the mountains allowed us to see that the urban, wired world we created for ourselves was off-kilter, a fallacy, maya.

When I returned to the urban, wired world of Toronto in October, I stopped eating sugary pastries and muffins for breakfast, and switched to smoothies, bran cereals, peanut-butter sandwiches, and oatmeal. Every morning throughout the winter, I did burpees. By the spring I’d lost almost fifteen pounds, and I decided it was warm enough outside to start jogging. I read books about alpinists and about disasters on Everest. And I set up an ambitious goal for myself: I wanted to hike Mount Kilimanjaro the following year once I was fit enough.

I’d never been fit. As a child, into my teens and even into my twenties, I’d always been underweight. It was only when I became an office worker that I gained the spare tire that is the hallmark of the urban, white-collar class. But after Banff? After all the burpees? No. I wanted to be far away. I wanted to meet Nepali monks in the shadows of Annapurna. I wanted to have a single-digit body-fat percentage and thighs like Corinthian columns, and I was on my way. After months of burpees, my calves were starting to look like they had butt implants. I felt stronger than I had in a long time, and I wanted to get even stronger.

Then in the summer came Ramadan, and I had to take a break from exercise for a few weeks so I could fast for the seventeen-hour July days. In the last ten days of Ramadan, the holiest and most blessed time of the Islamic calendar because it was when the Qur’an was first revealed, the veins in my brainstem burst.

It’s an old story, this thing in my brain, and it happened before. The first time, in 2006, I was in my late twenties. One night, there was a terrifying headache like the birth of Athena, and in the morning I was different. Nobody knew what had happened to me, but my body had changed. My body didn’t work. I’d lost control.

The hospital doctors told me I’d had a hemorrhage in my brain. They told me there was a clump of blood vessels shaped like a raspberry inside my medulla oblongata, the primitive part of the brain that tells the body how to do autonomic functions like breathing. A normal brain’s vessels there might look like a pack of straws, all carrying blood through the pipework without fail. My vessels were more like a sponge, full of pockets and holes. Blood didn’t flow through it as through plumbing. My sponge swelled and leaked, and when it did that it could kill me.

Somehow it didn’t. I didn’t do anything to survive, and they didn’t cut me open. They didn’t want to, because it’s not possible to surgically turn a sponge into a pack of straws, and any attempt would have left me infirm for life. They chose instead to let me heal on my own, which I was doing, but it’s a crazy thing to tell someone lying in a hospital bed with a hemorrhage in a part of the brain that controls their heartbeat, “You got this.”

I recovered, and not two months later I looked completely normal. There were small changes under the surface, yes, but no one would be able to tell by looking at me.

Seven years passed. Fast-forward past Banff and burpees and jogging, to the summer of 2013, to Ramadan and fasting, to the last ten days. One weekend, I felt a stinging behind my ear like a shard of glass winding its way through me. I suspected what it might be: a chunk of coagulated blood from another hemorrhage. When the headache came back, when I couldn’t hold myself up or walk straight, when I couldn’t swallow and when half my body felt packed in ice, I went back to the hospital. It had happened again.

I stopped doing burpees. I stopped jogging. I stopped thinking about mountains. The raspberry was eating me piece by piece. This time, it took away part of my balance forever. If I walk a certain way, no one notices. But when I move between the sink and the shower and the toilet, when I navigate around the island in the kitchen, I tip sideways and I have to catch myself every time. It hasn’t changed in three years, even after the initial physiotherapy. Part of me is gone and I won’t ever get it back.

Whatever there is of me now is the whole thing. I’m completely here, I’m whole, and that’s a beautiful thing.

But Kilimanjaro. Oh, Kilimanjaro…

Up there, even fit people can suffer from altitude sickness, that crippling and mind-altering state that occurs when there’s too little oxygen in the air to feed the brain. Even fit lungs tear, and even healthy brains bleed. I simply can’t take that risk.

So, I’m left dreaming of lost mountains.

I had another minor episode in the summer of 2016 because I lifted too many bags of rice and flour, too many bottles of cooking oil, too many boxes of dates at a Ramadan food drive. I was fasting and I was doing my duty as a Muslim, living my values, but my body did not like such exertions. For nearly two months after that day of volunteering, I spent hours lying in bed, woozy, aching, miserable, and unsure about what to do other than let my body heal itself. It did heal itself, but my doctor told me that, in the future, I’ll have to find some other way besides fasting to honour my beliefs during Ramadan. I can’t subject it to such deprivation.

It takes so little to remind me of my body’s limits, but I’m trying to expand those limits however I can. I’ve started exercising again, but more carefully, less strenuously. It’s very non-cinematic drudgery, a day-by-day effort to become stronger, one that doesn’t feel worthy of a story. It’s not satisfying to say that the mountain isn’t out there, but that it’s inside me, that I have some inner summit to conquer. Yes, yes, that’s also true, but, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about Kilimanjaro. I want it and I can’t have it and I’m angry and I want to be angry, so shut up. There’s no romance in squats. It’s not heroic. It’s not a National Geographic photo-essay. It’s only a response to faulty plumbing. It’s only—

Sigh.

That sustained and unglamorous effort is what defines character, heroic or not. We are dealt a hand, and what we do with the cards is up to us. And it’s not even that big of a deal, this so-called hand I’ve been dealt. So what if exercising is not “heroic”? Why does it have to be? I get so wrapped up in my melodrama that I can hardly stand myself.

But, fine, sometimes we have to take what we can get. My closest wilderness is the suburbs. There’s plentiful vegetation around here, and parks, and grass. There’s a stream nearby where frogs croak, and it leads to a storm overflow pond where ducks swim and geese bathe during a stopover on their trip to somewhere warmer or cooler than here.

And shovelling season is around the corner. I mean, I wanted to go to the snow-capped Himalayas, right? Isn’t singing “Heigh-Ho” while shovelling at, like, seven in the morning (every morning) kind of the same as digging yourself out of an avalanche in the Western Cwm? I get layered up, I put on my hiking boots and two layers of socks, and I dive with gusto into a layer of snow that feels like a full diaper. So, yeah, sure, that’s the same! I’m doing it! I’m really doing it! Now, go ahead, scrape that windshield! It’s exactly like using an ice axe on the seracs of the Khumbu Icefall! Yes!

Grumble, grumble, rassem-frassem…

I went for a walk one day this summer while I was recovering from my episode. My usual route took me over bike paths that weave through our neighbourhood and open up into ravines and streams and small forests full of songbirds. As I walked around a bend, the backyard hedges beside the trail fell away and revealed, in the distance, an enormous weeping willow tree. It must have been a literal hundred feet tall. I’d seen it many times before. It couldn’t have been more ordinary, something I’d ignored in the same way I ignore the colour of paint on walls. It faded into the background. It was the background. It looked like a giant, upside-down mop, and I just… I don’t notice mops. I’m sorry. And don’t give me that crap about mindfulness. Not about mops. Just… No.

Somehow on that sunny day, though, the sight of the weeping willow hit me like an ecstatic epiphany. Epiphany: “a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being; a moment of sudden revelation or insight.” I was a suburban shaman seeing into the spirit world, an initiate who’d spent years living in the caves now witnessing the sunrise for the first time. Something about that tree was… I was going to say “alive”, as if that wasn’t redundant. As it swayed in the breeze and shone under the sun, it radiated like magnetic north. I laughed and raised my arms—a victory pose. I suddenly understood what hunter-gatherer animists saw in the everyday world around them, and how humanity became spiritual.

And there I go again making everything grandiose and mythological. It’s a walk, not the Burning Bush. And, sure, maybe I’m halfway perpetuating the colonialist idea of the noble savage and the exotic land and all that. But at the most basic level, I do wonder how I can connect to that primal sensation of awe that unsettles and inspires me, that makes me

stop.

How and where do I experience again what I felt during that hike up to the Plain of Six Glaciers? Because I still dream of visiting monks in the Himalayas, or hiking through the Rift Valley and tripping on the undiscovered jawbone of some million-year-old ancestor, or finally making it all the way up to those six glaciers and fighting Gandalf, that bearded old bastard. When I look outside, though, the November sun goes down at five o’clock, and the darkness is uninviting, and the cold makes me want to curl up to my warm, cozy PlayStation 4, and—

Bah, forget it. I’ve talked too much. I’m going out for a walk before night falls. Maybe I’ll turn into a wolf and howl at the moon or something.

(Photos by: Dustin Groh, quentin lagache, Ben Moore, Superfamous, Lance Anderson, Asa Rodger)(This post also appears on Medium.)