The idea for Bhaji of the Dead, the comic I wrote for Bullseye Press, is a mix of two things – a fear of what could possibly be wrong with the food I eat, and my love for low budget horror movies.

I'm a picky eater.

I once went to a sea food festival at Versova and saw giant lobsters and crabs and prawns. To me they looked like sea insects, possibly mutated by some sort of nuclear radiation (I always imagined sea food as something that would fit in a plate, not the giant monsters I saw at this festival).

I spend twenty minutes weeding out finely chopped vegetables from (Indian) Chinese fried rice.

I don't eat mushrooms because the first time I ate a mushroom, I thought "this tastes like an eyeball". I've never eaten an eyeball, but I'm certain they're soft and squishy like mushrooms.

I'm a picky eater.

And then I read about gutter water farming. Gutter water farming is where farmers grow vegetables along railway tracks using gutter water. They water plants with this water, they wash harvested vegetables with this water.

This is when I decided I didn't like vegetables anymore.

No, that's a lie. I'd decided I didn't like vegetables a long time ago, because they taste yucky, they have a weird consistency and they aren't chicken.

But this gutter water farming thing horrified me. The newspaper said gutter water farming could result in the “early onset of Parkinson's disease, neuron degeneration, hearing and vision impairment and gastro-intestinal infections”.

Turning this already horrifying situation into a horror story wasn’t that much of a stretch.

A chemical spill at a factory turning residents of a nearby town into zombies is a common trope in low budget zombie films. I simply repurposed the trope for my story and came up with:

Chemical X spills out of a factory in Goregaon and mutates vegetables growing in neighbouring fields. Anyone who eats these vegetables turns into a flesh-eating zombie.

Sadly, I could only squeeze out seven pages of story from this premise. I had to fill the rest of the comic with Bollywood tropes (hopefully, I subverted enough of them), a lot of zombies, over-the-top action, a Shaun of the Dead homage and two gung-ho protagonists.

I think the comic turned out okay. I don’t know if people will like it, but I’m proud of the comic.

You can buy Aadhira Mohi #1: Bhaji of the Dead and some other cool comics from the Bullseye Press website here.