Zombiestan Read Free

himself down. Finally, his legs aching, he stopped to catch his breath. His usually curly and long hair (another cause of his mother's angst- why couldn't he get a haircut?) was now falling all over his face, and he wondered what was it about parents, anyways? Whatever he did never seemed to be good enough. And if they suddenly had discovered that he needed to be more responsible, weren't they to blame in any way?
     
    Mayukh's father was a senior government officer and he had grown up surrounded by people ready to do his father's bidding, never having to work too hard at anything. For his parents to suddenly wake up and demand that he miraculously become independent was more than a bit unfair. He was now old enough to realize that his father's connections had got him into the best schools, and had ensured that he never had to join a queue to do anything. But he was not yet old enough to realize that one day, when his father retired, he would have to learn to fend for himself without that safety blanket.
     
    However, for now, he was content to sit at the nearby shop and drink some Coke and curse the unfairness of it all. He asked the man for a cigarette, and he hesitated as if sizing up how old Mayukh was. At close to six feet tall, Mayukh was very tall for his age and together with a physique that came from four years of playing football on the school team meant that nobody could guess he had just turned seventeen. That was till they looked closer at his face- for his eyes were still the open, trusting eyes of a kid. But the shopkeeper was not interested in such subtleties and passed on a Marlboro.
     
    Mayukh puffed away, imagining what his mother would do when she found out he smoked on the sly once in a while. He didn't like it much, and usually coughed his guts out, but none of his friends would ever know that.
     
    His mobile phone beeped and he picked it up. It was his best friend, Shiv.
     
    'Dude, are we on for our session tomorrow?'
     
    'Of course!'
     
    Then, Mayukh remembered the mood his mother had been in, and added.
     
    'Hey Shiv, is it okay if we meet at your place instead?'
     
    Many things brought the two boys together- a love for cars, a fair distaste for studies and above all else, a passion for gaming. They could spend hours in front of their PS3s, joining forces in myriad online battlegrounds, blasting away at whatever villains it threw at them. With the mood his mother was in, Mayukh figured this time, it might be more prudent to go over to Shiv's place instead of sitting in front of the PS3 in his room.
     
    Mayukh noticed the TV playing in a corner of the shop. There was a banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen. One or two other people who had come to buy cigarettes at the shop had stopped to watch. One of them said aloud what was on all their minds.
     
    'That is one screwed up country, isn't it? First the Taliban, then bloody Osama, then the American war, and now this. They should just nuke it and end the misery.'
     
    Mayukh never spent too much time in front of the TV, least of all watching news, but over the last twenty-four hours, there was no avoiding the news that had been coming out of Afghanistan. It was all over the Net, and all over every news channel. He could hear the newscaster read out her lines.
     
    'The US military has repeated that the sudden upsurge in violence following the reported deaths of Mullah Omar and Ayam Al-Zawahiri is not a cause for concern and represents the death throes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.'
     
    The screen cut away to a balding, white man in a military uniform.
     
    'We won a major battle in our ongoing war on terror two days ago with the strike that took out the top leadership of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Taliban are now little more than disorganized rabble and the spate of suicide bombings yesterday just show how desperate they are getting in their attempts to destabilize Afghanistan and the progress the democratically