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.

You’ve got to feel a sense of power in knowing things. After all, don’t they say that knowledge is power? In seeing through the fog of lies. In resisting being coaxed into the colourful story they are painting for you. In… well, in knowing the truth. Because… Shanky knew things. He knew the truth about many things that happened in Bandem’s life; and not just the ones you’re expecting. Bandem had his moments of embarrassment; you know, things you’re ashamed of, things you wish you could go back in time and undo, things thinking about which keeps you up at night. And what complicates things even more here is that maybe Bandem is not even responsible for them; that he has to live with them. Lie about them. But the thing is, Shanky would not out Bandem. And the fact that you share a decade long friendship is not even close to being the real reason here.

Many a story have been written about what the “greatest tragedy” is; each with their own interpretations. And, rightly so, there is no correct, or one, answer. And yet, I think we can say all these interpretations circle around one idea: the end of a life. Now, whether you think of it as death, or whether something more arbitrary, is up to you. The beauty of art, someone said, is that it can’t be defined. Or at least defined exclusively. To this, Anpag and Bandem both had faced their own shares of, well, a tragic life. Anpag’s tragedy, not to downplay his affliction of course, was more direct. An illness that made him suffer, and eventually led to his sad demise. Bandem’s, on the other hand, was more… well, let’s call it indirect. As he grew up, he found himself becoming… well, becoming someone he never wanted to be. The universal truth of it – because it is universal – became Bandem’s tragedy. A tragedy that, unlike Anpag’s, remained within him for much longer. Now, who would you say suffered more?

There’s a line June Gable said (who played the undeniably funny Estelle Leonard in Friends), which, truth be told, goes down really well in many a situation. “Things change. Roll with them.” Of course, she didn’t exactly say it in the same context as in this episode of The Four Boys Club, but it can be perfectly applied here. Because, well, things do change, don’t they? And with things, so do people. Can we say we are exactly the same of who we were as kids? That the tide of time has not changed us? Or even withered us? The person we are talking about in this episode is Mompy. As a teenager, he was the guy you’d be envious with. Because he had everything; he was amicable, was great with people, had a lot of friends, and, of course, a cool dad (who was actually called The Cool Dad). But somewhere down the line, he… changed. And, well, he did wither. Became a hostage of his own insecurities. And no one saw this change more than his now wife, Midhali.

Baz Lurhmann made a reference to friendship in his Sunscreen speech. “Friends come and go, but a precious few you should hold on,” he said. Notwithstanding the context he said it in, but friends do come and go. The tide comes and washes the land away, changing the landscape of how it all once looked. From being friends long ago, Mompy and Bandem are now… well, people who wouldn’t much care for one another. Not to say that should either of them be drowning the other wouldn’t do whatever they could to save them. There was no argument – or a fight, or a skirmish – that marked the rupture in their friendship. It just… happened. And it grew to a point where, when they returned to the neighbourhood during their respective breaks from work, it developed into awkwardness – you know, trying to avoid a conversation, trying to avoid each other. Come to think of it, this kind of parting is as natural as… well, as the sun’s trajectory from east to west, isn’t it?

Every artist needs a muse – how many times have we heard this phrase? An inspiration so to speak, something which drives them. Vince Aletti likened a muse to a mirror; a reflection of their desires, anxieties, dreams and needs. Ross Baldwin said how, without a muse, an artist is simply a madman. Now all that’s fine and dandy, but no one has really touched upon something far more empirical. An inspiration doesn’t necessarily mean the high skies of glory, right? It can also be a path down the wormhole of madness. Shanky, who as it turns out did have all his ambitions fulfilled, did find his muse. It came after a long and arguably hard fought struggle; times marked by questions of… pardon the aggravation, self existential crisis. But like the parting of the dense, dark, grey clouds that reveal the warmth of the sun, it eventually did. Shanky found his muse in the unlikeliest of places; a place that you’ll note he had not even been aware of. But when he found it, you can be assured he didn’t let it go.

A lot happened in the first season of The Four Boys Club. We were introduced to the four boys themselves – Shanky Vai, Mompy Arda, Bandem Asra, and Anpag Benza – and got a peek into their lives. There were moments that were dramatic (after all, each story needs drama) and – perhaps I’m being a little ambitious – it makes for a good storyline. So, before the second lot of stories is released soon, here’s an account of all that happened in Season 1.

The things is, you can’t keep yourself away from that well. You can fool yourself into believing it’s not there; convince yourself that the very idea of it is not just ridiculous but inconceivable. But, deep down, you know it is there. You know looking into it is a mistake, because the face reflecting on that seemingly serene surface of water isn’t yours. It terrifies you at first, but you remind yourself there wasn’t anything else that you expected. And this reflection will tantalise you. Like the snake that tempted Eve to eat the apple she knew she wasn’t meant to. In your mind, you do understand the water is poisonous, and you also understand it’s dangerous to drink it. But if we were all rational all the time, the world would be a much different place, wouldn’t it? You will take a sip of that water. And you will relish it. Why? Because as drastic, as life altering the consequences of it may be, you won’t care about it in that moment. And now that that water is within you, life will perhaps never be the same.

There’s a dark well. A well you go to, to draw water from when you’re angry. You know the water is toxic, poisonous even, but you still do. Because you can’t help it. Sometimes the anger is too substantial, too overpowering, that things like reasoning lose all significance. You stand just outside it, peer down… and you’re scared. Scared of the water. What if it burns you, leaves you suffering and afflicted? What if it leaves you scarred, not physically but emotionally? And, in doing so, marks you as its own? But the thing is, you need that water. Because the poison it carries will be your liberation. It will, in a strange and inexplicable way, heal you from the cut you endured all those years ago as a child; the cut that still stings you, sending a current of pain through you, long after you’ve grown into adulthood. How do you stop yourself from taking a deep, long sip of that corrupted water?

We can agree that, for the longest time (or at least since we started chronicling The Four Boys Club), Anpag has been someone we’ve known about the least. All we know about him is that he is a reluctant member of the club, doesn’t particularly like his friends, and therefore, was the likeliest to leave the group before anyone else. As true as those things were, he impressed upon us a sense of arrogance; which made him, him. But Anpag, in this episode, is beginning to experience what we’ll call a change of heart. Oh he is still a self-righteous frustration to many; we won’t take that away from him. But an indefinable change has happened, literally inside of him, and this change had thereby altered the nucleus of his thoughts. A catch of Don McLean’s song American Pie comes to mind, “Something touched me deep inside, the day the music died.”

You remember the girl from the previous episode, There… and Then Gone? Yes, the one we can call Bandem’s sweetheart? Her name as a matter of fact is Midhali, something which wasn’t revealed last time, and we are going to learn more about her, and her involvement, right now. As we found out towards the end of the last episode, all that had transpired was a fantasy; Bandem’s fantasy. But the reality, as we are about to discover, is far different. Because, much to Bandem’s displeasure, Midhali has been invited to the treehouse by Mompy; to help the two boys sort out the mess – that is, the man from episode five who Bandem brought with him in the treehouse, the one Bandem had hit in an accident.

Do you remember creating fantasies in your head as an adolescent – the age where the world is literally your oyster and possibilities are endless? Where the prospects of something being improbable, if not impossible, doesn’t stop you from wishing it true? We’ve all been there, immersed in our own version of reality; and no matter how unlikely the outcome, we are ambitious enough to… well, you know. Bandem had created one such fantasy. A fantasy that perhaps all of us are well-familiar with. And the fantasy was the bubble he shared with her, which was not only of his own creation but was a sanctuary. A place where he crawled into time and again because… well, because of the simple reason that it made him feel good. But this bubble, like many others, at the end burst.

We’ve heard that story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Two selves in one, and all. I suppose Patricia Highsmith described it brilliantly in Strangers on a Train (which if you remember was also adapted into a Hitchcock movie): “There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world.” This episode in a way deals with that phenomenon. In more ways than one, Shanky was a case of split personality. Not in the more medical sense; and definitely not something worth an academic diagnosis. But, in a more personal sense, it was the branching of this other personality – which we will call, for the lack of a better word, Other Shanky – that became a crucially significant factor in him becoming who he eventually became. Spoiler alert: there is a good ending here. It traverses some dark alleys, but, rest assured, you’ll find a positive ending.

Today, we go back to the first episode of our podcast. Remember that – “The Distraction”? Bandem found myself in a bit of a pickle, having nudged (without intending to, as we had learned) a man in front of a car. We didn’t pursue that story then, for we had more facets of The Four Boys Club to explore. But now, we go back to that horrid incident; as much Bandem may call it an “accident,” and we want to believe him predominantly because we have no reason not to, the forgettable incident did bring its own repercussions. For Bandem and his family for starters, which is fairly obvious but something we will not be discussing a great deal about. But it provided Anpag, who we have seen was already finding reasons to jump the ship he shared with the other three boys, an opportunity to pull himself out of the club; something I suppose we can say with reasonable certainty we saw coming. And, much to our disappointment, he did exactly that.

We’ve all had role models as kids, right? A celebrity rockstar, a sportsperson who shattered records, a prominent pioneer. What is it with the lives of these personalities that makes them so… alluring? Do we see ourselves leading their lives? Do we see ourselves… as them? For some, role models need not be anyone popular. They can be as ordinary as common people. People we can relate to, whose thoughts and ideas and beliefs and ways of thinking encourage us to rise above ourselves, whose individualism inspires us. Anpag was a highly ambitious kid. And so, his role model was an equally ambitious man. The fact that Anpag’s life will take a definitive turn in the years to come may speak otherwise; but we’ll come to that a few episodes later, for it doesn’t help to jump the gun.

Think back on that one incident, perhaps from years ago, that has never really left your mind. Even though the participants from that incident have clearly moved on, even forgotten about it, to this date it still clings to your mind; maybe even boils your blood. Something akin to that has happened to many of us, hasn’t it? The memory of that one incident which has for the longest time invaded our thoughts, refusing to let go. And the fact that it happened years, maybe even decades, ago doesn’t offer any consolation. Shanky is afflicted with… let’s call it, for the lack of a better word, this memory syndrome. He was in a fight once upon a time, and – what’s more? – he was beaten black and blue. Those physical scars may have faded, but its impact remains. And maybe even continues to haunt him to this day.