Earthly Playing Field : A Novel

A speculative novel of love and revolution set in a sci-fi present. Roma has a steady job, a mortgage, and a surrogate family in Queens. But as she moves through her daily routines, the powerful Empire that rules her world bares its teeth elsewhere-crushing freedom movements across the planet, including the Punjabi farmers' uprising where her younger brother struggles on the frontlines. Roma's life is upended when her older brother entrusts her with a strange gift: an ordinary-looking plant that manifests as a sophisticated bioengineered technology. The `cell' opens a portal for an extraterrestrial spirit-body bearing news of a liberated future-and the potential to hack AI warfare-propelling Roma and her family into the core of a rising resistance. As present and prophecy converge, Roma grapples with her troubled faith, ruminating on mystic poetics and anticolonial legacies while yearning for a bewitching woman whose heart will only ever belong to the revolution.