Zombie World
Amara was looking for a good moisturing lotion when her phone beeped. Out of the blue, Ragini sent her a picture of a bottle of lotion, suggesting she try it. The hair on Amara’s neck went up. She often felt an angel was watching her every move and every need, living with her like a shadow. Could the shadow go anywhere without her? How long had this shadow been around? Where did it come from? It felt increasingly strange how often her friend Ragini was bumping into Amara the past few weeks. Whenever she met, Ragini covered her face with a dupatta citing pollution and spoke about work and her mother’s physiotherapy. Amara was deep in thought about Ragini when Zelda messaged her, suggesting they meet. In the adjacent room, someone called Amara’s mother to get a recipe for carrot pickles. Amara’s shadow watched everything and grinned.
The tall and beautiful Zelda stood before the mirror and carefully framed sentences with the words given to her. She repeated them with voice modulation et al, as though she was to appear for an exam. She inserted a smile here and a smirk there, trying her best to sound natural. She wore the pastel pink dress and slipped into the white heels as suggested to her and drove down to the cafe by the seaside. She parked her car right under the neem tree adjoining the cafe as per the plan. Amara was dressed in white and waiting for Zelda at a seat by the window. Her shadow was walking restlessly around her.
Inside the cafe, Zelda suggested they switch to a different table. She ordered a Mochaccino and stirred it with her left hand. Wasn’t Zelda always a right-handed person? Amara wondered. Zelda ordered a dish in yellow and red to go with her coffee, and spoke to Amara. She was careful to cover the topics she had rehearsed on, often checking her phone to see if she had missed something. Every now and then Veronica messaged her to keep the conversation in check. The members of the family in the adjacent table were planning a holiday in Europe. Amara and Zelda ended up in the background of their group photographs.
After half an hour, Amara left, feeling a lot like a search engine that had been fed too many phrases. She was painfully aware of the lack of sincerity in the conversation. Did Zelda have scripted conversations only with Amara? Why? Zelda and Ragini increasingly reminded her of zombies.
As she walked towards the parking lot, Amara accidentally bumped into Saloni, a long lost friend from school. What was Saloni doing here? Amara’s shadow smiled. In a few minutes, the conversation covered much ground on one topic, road trips. Then Amara decided she wanted to leave.
She got into the car and dialed the phone number of the new bakery to which she had supplied home-made Bundt cakes recently. The owner was hesitant to place repeat orders. Amara proposed, the shadow disposed.
Jefferson carefully curated the conversations he had set up around Amara. He would now plan the next set of scenes, dialogues, actors and locations. He had a long list of small and big actors to choose from, even cameos.
Everyone acquainted with Amara was living in Jefferson’s World of Zombies. In there, every small act and every small item of Amara was a marketing prop. Every message hitting the inbox, every phone call, every chance meeting, Jefferson had a say in it all. Amara had little say over her life, for the watchful shadow always reigned her in and wrote her story. It was a ruthless world and the inhabitants performed to Jefferson’s orchestra. Jefferson was a fan of Shakespeare. He lived by the bard’s words, ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players’.
Money made the zombie world go around.
