“Look, that’s another author we have in our apartment complex…” — this is how a friend pointed out Zarreen to me. We were attending a Zumba class in the club house. My first book, The Curse of Anuganga had been released and Zarren’s second, Koi Good News? was making waves on the Indian writing and publishing scene.
A few shy smiles and formal introductions later, we met for coffee. The Zumba classes eventually stopped but what followed was a friendship – gentle and dear – that I have cherished for the past seven or eight years.
From a neighbour whom I kept bumping into at condo events, during evening walks (hers, anyway, as I would usually be in the car coming back from work) or at the school bus stop, she became a friend. Anything that caught my attention be it in the author circles that we inhabited or within the condominium, I would ping her on WhatsApp. She would do the same, calling or messaging when something caught her fancy. We would discuss books, our own drafts, movies, shows, basically anything under the sun. A novella I had written that had been published first on the Juggernaut App and then on Kindle some years back had many characters inspired by people in our condominium. When she read it, she called me up, exclaiming – “This is so-and-so, right? Wicked, wicked!” And then she chuckled, “Relax, no one reads here anyway, you are safe! They won’t find out.”
Zarreen was witty, humorous, gentle, shy, yet incredibly warm. Every single minute I got to spend with her was full of fun and genuine laughter.
When her diagnosis came last September, she sent me a message saying she would be ‘underground’ for a while, but asked me to keep messaging her with gossip, funny forwards and the like. I did. I checked on her continuously and I got to see her, though not as frequently, as I would have liked to. A planned coffee date – pending since July – never happened in the end. It is a regret I will always carry. When she pinged me one evening, I was down with a viral fever; by the time I recovered, her health had taken a nosedive. When I read her message on 20th August, asking me to reach out to her sister as she was feeling completely knocked out (“Pretty rubbish, honestly.. totally miserable”), my heart sank.
The end came, inevitable and unavoidable, on 16 September 2026.
Zarreen, you are deeply loved and will be missed by all of us. Farewell, my friend! Till we meet again.
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