Sadia Hakim, despite her elders having South Asian roots (no particular country), lives in Europa and debuted her book, The Weight of Tender Things, from France.
When one hears Europa, the image of Jovian moons or far away stars like Alpha Centauri come to mind. They never realize that EuropaCity, an ambitious 800,000 sqm project, located outside Paris, was abandoned before it even came into existence, or that the Europa she lives in is a very real and underdeveloped neighborhood in the suburbs not mapped on Google. This reality combined with her love for space and cosmic word play confuses people.
As a hyperlexic child, she was born with a passion for STEM but initially her education path was taken away from STEM because of local educational limitations. She pursued a formal education in art, literature and general studies, but her neurodivergence instilled a lifelong interest in understanding the world in all its aspects which led her back to STEM.
She once shared in an interview how she broke down in tears when her school pressured all students into the arts. Hailing from a suburb where STEM opportunities were scarce, she felt schools were essential for mastering technical fields, while art was a soulful necessity she could carry anywhere.
She shows a keen interest in genetics, quantum entanglement, and clinical sciences, themes that regularly emerge throughout her writing. One of her quotes observes that “death is written in DNA,” underscoring how her technical training informs her philosophical worldview. Alongside her work as a full-time researcher, she channels her neurodivergent focus into more than twenty active hobbies, and she playfully answers questions about race or caste by calling herself “Humanly Centaurian.”
While she maintains a clear line between her private life and her public creative work, her official bio situates her in a quiet countryside. Readers often overlook her hometown of Europa, assuming it is fictional, an irony she thoroughly enjoys. In truth, Europa is a real suburban area known to residents as “The City of Frozen Lakes.” Its climate swings between two extremes: a short spring of lush meadows and flowing streams, followed by an enduring winter as cold and unyielding as Antarctica. She once joked the place should just be called “The City of Forgotten Lakes.”
Europa is split right down the middle by its own terrain. One half sits in a near-perpetual freeze, its lakes locked under thick ice for most of the year. The other half cycles through six distinct shifts: summer, winter, spring, fall, the rains, and a season of raw haboobs. Even then, winter always manages to hit the hardest. Much like the cold desert country around Utah, where snowbanks sit right next to bone-dry dirt, the weather is erratic.
A clear morning can easily dissolve into a blinding snowstorm, a barrage of hail, or a sudden downpour with rattling thunder. The most infamous phenomenon is a recurring haboob locals call the “Black Mustrida Wall.” It kicks up when high-altitude downbursts hammer the dry lakebeds, throwing up a rolling screen of dark, murky mustard dust that can bleed into rust orange or blot out the sun until midday looks pitch black. It looks surreal from a distance, but living through it is miserable.
The air turns thick and sour in seconds. Coughing fits and asthma flare-ups are just part of life here.If the storm remains for more than two hours, families find themselves trapped indoors, fighting off a claustrophobic sense of suffocation as the dust chokes out the town.With sparse settlements, minimal residential clusters, and no academic institutions for higher education, the town illustrates the early educational hurdles that fueled Sadia’s hunger to explore the wider world. Though they have developed somewhat and have a small university but it’s more of a high school. The area still remains underdeveloped.
Driven by her research projects, she now travels frequently. Popularly recognized as “the poet from Alpha Centauri,” she wears her longing for the otherworldly openly. Because her official birth date remains unconfirmed, her bio whimsically claims she is four billion years old, having arrived directly from the stars of Alpha Centauri.
The Banned Biography of Sadia Hakim