TALE WITH A FIZZ

Actor, producer, now writer-will the real Huma Qureshi please stand up?

- ANJULY MATHAI

Actor Huma Qureshi has written a book-Zeba, an Accidental Superhero-and much like our heroine, there is that which is accidental about the book. It was not a planned masterpiece, but a zig-zaggy tour through Huma's imagination. All themes in the book, she says, are accidental, and she gives the reader full rights of interpretation. "I invite all readers to draw their own inferences from what they feel about it," she says.

In essence, she is telling us to make of it what we will, and so, that is exactly what we are going to do. Zeba, we deduct, is the badass version of Huma. She is Huma on steroids, Huma in high-resolution, Huma in a cape (pick the metaphor of your preference). For those of you who have not read Zeba, it is about a second-generation American immigrant who is the "chosen one" (kind of the female sum of the parts of Neo,

Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter) to save the people living in the fictional kingdom of Khudir ruled by an evil dictator, the Great Khan.