‘Into the Forest’: An elegant novel about the obligations to humanity during troubled times

The three-year-long Covid-19 pandemic was a horror saga and yet we remember so little of our individual days in isolation. The every day – repeated in the exact pattern over and over again – perhaps disabled the part of our brain that sieves the extraordinary from the ordinary, the unforgettable from the forgettable, memories from reality.

We remember the sickness and death – always together, always lurking. We remember the loneliness – new and debilitating. We remember the despair – malevolent, all-consuming. It was the worst of times. Still, there were stories of hope, of shared humanity, of friendship in unexpected places.

Avtar Singh’s new novel Into the Forest takes us to Germany during the grim times of the early lockdowns. Covid-19 – referred to as “the sickness” – does not stop rumours and crimes from taking place. “Scandal finds fuel in a time of isolation”, says a journalist (also called Avtar), after a young German woman goes missing. She was last seen in public sitting “too close” to Nabi, an Afghan refugee, who is a janitor at the local hospital. Besides disappearances, hate crimes and racist attacks are also at an all-time high. However, no one expected a local, much less a White woman, to...

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