by Ruchira Paul
“Sewer designs… For me, it took about a year to exhaust my fascination with the underground maze of waste. That’s when I realized the single most important point to grasp about designing sewer lines is that the shit must flow downhill. That’s all one needs to know. Nothing else matters.” So muses Emma, a smart young sewer engineer and the protagonist of Sara Goudarzi’s debut novel The Almond in the Apricot. The book takes us through the convoluted maze of Emma’s own inner turmoil that begins to blur the boundaries between her physical world and her dreams.
Emma’s troubles begin shortly after the sudden accidental death of her best friend and confidante Spencer to whom she had felt more attracted physically and emotionally than she does to her kind and decent boyfriend Peter. The tragedy negatively affects both her personal and professional lives. Without the lively presence of Spencer as the third side of the triangle, Emma finds her romantic interest in Peter dwindling. Peter’s kindness and decency begin to strike Emma as bland attributes – “neither acidic nor alkaline, a perfect pH 7.0 of a human.” She becomes careless and negligent at work. The most worrisome manifestation of Emma’s state of mind is the appearance of vivid, disturbing nightly dreams that encroach upon her waking hours. Emma begins to lose her footing in the real world, becoming exhausted, erratic and suspicious as also a bit of a schemer who no longer has too many qualms about betraying those close to her. Read more »