The Four Boys Club

At the turn of the last episode, Storyteller part 1, you got a glimpse into how and why the four boys came into being. Maybe the reason isn’t as dramatic as you would have hoped, but things hardly ever are.

You are never warned with a dramatic musical prelude before you meet a life altering event. Seriously, when was the last time you consciously knew an event you were living was actually going to be life altering? The thing is, events like these come up, rattle the little cage that is your life, turn things upside down, and leave; changing you as a person. And you don’t stop to wonder how it changed you. You go with the flow.

And then you only return to it in hindsight. Years later, when the sun is about to glide below the horizon, calling it a day, do you look back and wonder about that singular moment in time when you changed.

Because wonder is all you can do.

You’ve probably heard a lot about the shifting nature of reality, but nothing has summed up the entire phenomenon as well as Bill Cipher when he said “Reality is an illusion, the universe is a hologram.” And before that, was the masterpiece The Truman Show; where Jim Carrey, as ordinary as his profession (that of an insurance salesman), realises eventually how his entire life has been a TV show. But can you ever tell? Have you never, in those quiet hours of the night when the world is silent, asked yourself if all this (and, by all this I actually mean all this) is real? Have you never thought if you’re living a lie, that what you consider reality is perhaps, as Bill Cipher says, an illusion? More importantly, though, does it even matter what things are? Does everything always need a shape, a form, a definition? Don’t we all just live whatever version of reality is convincingly favourable for us? Pardon the crypticity; it is but a mere glimpse into what happens in the final two episodes; about the shifting truth of Shanky and his offshoots.

Grief is perhaps the one topic many a book has been written on. There are endless research papers, endless shows, endless whatever medium of entertainment or information you consume that cover grief as a subject. I suppose, after love (and maybe death, though I’m not entirely certain about that one), grief is what has captivated people’s interest the most.

You know about those five stages of grief? Purely academic, I’m sure. Because when you actually find yourself in the deep recess of that unimaginable pain that is grief, you don’t care about the stages. All you see is… bleakness, desolation. That inhospitable desert where no tree grows and no animal can survive. The ground is impenetrable, and the cracks on it lacerate your feet.

In the wake of Anpag’s disappearance, and the fate that befell him, a kind of fracture developed in his parent’s lives. Much of it, as his mother notes in this episode, was self-inflicted; but there is someone else she blames, someone she is mightily angry with.

And that rage won’t subside.

Fantasising about the past… Now, who hasn’t indulged in a little bit of that. You know that utterly cliched, overused line about how the past is history and the future is a mystery and all that? The message that that line is trying to convey is that dwelling on the past is futile and even downright stupid. But when did we ever evolve into a species that had managed to escape stupidity? If fantasising about the past is the anthem of stupidity, well, we are all singing it at the top of our lungs. The thing is, the past sticks. And it stays. And it festers. And then it grows, seeping into your fantasies, your dreams, your very lives. It rules over you, dominates you. But at times the past is sweet, you know? Like a garden of every imaginable fragrance. And no matter what the sages say about letting the past be where it is, better to even bury it, you don’t want to deprive yourself of that… joy.

“Ideas are bulletproof,” goes a line in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. I don’t disagree, and, yet – as you’ll notice in the case of Midhali in this episode – your thoughts and ideas being bulletproof is actually like a double edged sword. You can kill the mind that holds that thought, but the thought in itself… it transcends the very box it’s kept in. It can inspire, it can uplift, it can lead to a change. But that’s all on a sociopolitical level, isn’t it? On a personal level, that incessant, that insisting noise in your head can cause agony; and in many cases, a deep anguish. We all know at least one person, if we aren’t them ourselves, who thinks too much. And if you’re an overthinker – someone, for example, who deliberates too much, or is indecisive about the minutest of things, or has a gazillion thoughts swimming in their head at any point of time – you’ll relate to the struggle. You’ll relate to the madness, the kind of madness that is worth wanting to push through the tough head of yours and pluck these very thoughts out and kill them.