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.

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.

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.