Space and Spice and Everything Precise

The book

Ever been told you feel too much? On Noumura, they have a powder for that.

Aliens in therapy | Masala chai | An intergalactic bromance feat. an AI trained on fan fiction

Neil Kohli is a Singapore-based therapist with a chai habit and a faded cloth pouch holding spices, memories and a pinch of his grandmother’s ashes. He’s spent years helping people make sense of their feelings. His own are mostly in the pouch. It’s a system that works fine, right up until he’s accidentally abducted by an alien spaceship.

Running the ship is Aww, an AI with opinions on everything, especially Neil’s spectacularly human attempts to pretend he’s fine. Aww is narrating the whole thing, and somewhere between the chai and the crises, he starts developing some alarmingly human feelings of his own. Starting with a best friend.

Their destination is Noumura, a planet where meals, medicines and even memories come powdered, and emotions were outlawed centuries ago. Love is dangerous. Grief is a malfunction.

So Neil does what he knows best. He starts a support group. The refreshments are masala chai.

Slowly, Noumura’s variants find their way to his circle: the few whose feelings refuse to stay switched off. A young artist who sees colors no one else can. An elder who hoards memories. A gentle giant secretly caring for a glowing creature. A mother writing forbidden stories for her son.

One spice added to the chai each week. One forbidden feeling said out loud. And a circle of misfits begins to suspect that the problem was never them. It was the room they were in.

For fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea, the Wayfarers series and Ted Lasso.