Chatting up Andaleeb Wajid: Scare Walk

Fighting Fear

Upamanyu Bhattacharyya

Andaleeb Wajid

The pitter patter of the rain spells 'a mug of steaming coffee in one hand and a book in the other' kind-of-weather. The rain, the hills covered in mist, have typically served as a setting for horror stories. But what if you are in your city, signing up for a scare walk that seems fun? What if the scares are not designed but real? Fear is never a solitary emotion. It multiplies with uneasiness, distrust exposing us to our dark side.

Ask Veera, Angelina, Ishaan and Dhruv. The four teenagers want to chill a bit before their dreaded board exams begin. A visit to a bungalow on the outskirts of Bangalore for an advertised scare walk seems like a fun idea. And, why not? It means Ishaan can spend some more time with Angie and Veera could hold hands with Dhruv...with some scares thrown in for laughs!

But what awaits the teenagers is something sinister and ugly. Picture huge waves, a shape shifting dog and treacherous mountain cliffs in Bangalore? Nothing is what it seems, especially the friendship the four teenagers thought they shared with each other. Andaleeb Wajid, who authored Scare Walk, a brilliantly designed  immersive graphic novella, says, “I think horror genre is exciting because it lets you experience the worst moments of the protagonist’s life and then you step away from it when you shut the book and resume your normal life. I wanted to convey the same sense of confidence that the kids feel when they enter the house. But as they progress, they are uneasy with the situation. The moment of true horror is when they realise everything is real. The way each of them experiences the horror is partly shaped by their personalities.” 

The Bangalore-based author originally wrote Scare Walk as a novella. But upon reading it, editor Tina Narang (HarperCollins) felt that it would work as a graphic novella. 

Next came in Upamanyu Bhattacharyya, a Kolkata-based animation director, who illustrated the text. “My intention was to draw something that was close to what Andaleeb had envisioned. We shared a round of designs for the characters, followed by test pages and a rough sketch pass of the story to ensure that the text was translating well to images and flowing the way she wanted it to,” explains Upamanyu. 

Upamanyu adds that the story had chapters dedicated to each of the characters' points of view, allowing the reader to clue into their objectivity or subjectivity. “I used Veera’s glasses as a recurring motif to suggest the thin boundary between the worlds shown in the story,” he says. 

Now, where is that mug of coffee as you leaf through Scare Walk?  

(This article was first written for Amritabharati)