The Four Boys Club Shaurya Arya-Kanojia

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.