“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?” A camera light shined expectantly on my college-going face. This lady with a beautifully fake smile needed video bytes for an energy drink campaign. Suddenly, a violent bolt of lightning struck the steel gate behind me. Its doors swung wildly, before a swerving truck slipped off the road, screeching and barreling towards us. The giant 105-year-old banyan tree fell simultaneously; its leaves in fiery flames from dangling wet livewires. With a miraculous swoop of ninja-level awareness, I pushed the woman out of danger and dodged all disasters. “Crazy, huh?”
The week before that, I had rescued two babies from a marauding hunchback whale at Juhu beach. Their indebted parents built a monument dedicated to my heroics in their colony.
One morning, on the verge of helping a blind man cross the street, I saw a girl. She swooped in and guided him across. She described to him and made him visualise the boy on the pavement who was watching a panting dog, who in turn watched a chicken being roasted in the shop window.
This girl had stolen my thunder.
I followed her to the train station, noticed her fascination for the photo booth, and then observed her for days. She loved being an anonymous do-gooder. There was a private theatricality about her ways. Though she seemed like a regular girl on the outside, in her mind she was the impassioned protagonist of her own black-and-white biopic. I could even hear the accordion-heavy soundtrack of her imaginary movie.
She worked in a café. She lived alone in a small flat. She wished her lonely widower father would get out and explore the world. In her spare time, she would booby-trap her rude local vendor’s flat to teach him a lesson. She didn’t have many friends. I sensed she would understand me.
We even shared the same childhood friend, a friendly crocodile with a heart ailment. She loved skipping stones over water, an activity I mastered to impress her. Inspired by her, I even embraced the voyeuristic delight of watching faces respond to films in dark cinema halls. I watched her for months.
And soon, I fell in love with her. I wanted to be with her, even though we didn’t speak the same language.
There was only one problem.
Her name was Amélie Poulain. We occupied different worlds, quite literally. She belonged to a film, created by a talented artist named Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
In Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001), he had brought her to life in a way that seemed more tangible, more alluring, than any girl I had known. To me she wasn’t the famous French actress Audrey Tatou; she was Amélie of Montmartre, who didn’t know I was admiring her, just like her beneficiaries didn’t know she healed them.
As an introvert who made up life more than living it, I believed I had found my soulmate. Times were hard for dreamers; we had to stick together.
Is there a procedure to pine for someone who doesn’t exist? As a writer, my short stories involved personas I fantasised about: attributes I admired, flaws I desired. They were a result of my predispositions, a manifestation of my affections … minus the thrill of discovery. I didn’t need to find what I loved about them.
In Ruby Sparks (2012), young author Calvin (Paul Dano) falls for his creation, Ruby (Zoe Kazan). He has a dizzy relationship with her before discovering that everything she feels is down to him. Everything they have is immune to spontaneity. Their conflicts, too, revolve around careless extensions of her pre-defined nature. When he gets jealous, he can simply control her by writing a new page. She’s only as human as he wanted her to be.
But I could do no such thing with Amélie. She turned her own pages. When I felt possessive, I’d simply switch off the film before she seeks Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), who was her creator’s idea of a happy ending. I prefer to think their fanciful courtship wouldn’t have lasted. I dreamt far harder, and far deeper than him. I did it for a living.
Loving her assured me that there were more like us: those who drifted away between conversations; those who froze time between milliseconds; those who slayed dragons and paid bills in the same breath. And there were people who thought we were fascinating enough to make art about. Le Fabuleux Destin d'Rahul Desailly had a ring to it. If only Amélie knew I existed; if only I couldn’t know she didn’t.
One morning, as I was about to rescue a cat from a burning building, an exceptionally blue-eyed man beat me to it.
His name was Walter Mitty.
He was a negative assets manager at a magazine designing its final print issue. The man had spent so long realising the vision of a master photojournalist (Sean Penn, in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 2013) in a dark room that even his flights of fantasy assumed the breathtaking imagery of Sean’s destinations. His office job, I suspected, was actually his “secret life”.
As I watched him jump into helicopters, freezing oceans, creaky fishing vessels, wrestle with sharks, cycle across Greenland, escape from volcanoes, offer cake to bandits and scale the Afghani Himalayas, it became obvious: Amélie deserved him. It broke my heart that they made a better, and less practical, couple. His daring adventures complemented her philanthropic naivety.
I knew how they’d meet: her father, now a globetrotter inspired by his garden gnome’s mysterious travels, would encounter Mitty in an exotic country and introduce him to his daughter.
Unlike me, they belonged to the same medium. Their paths had to converge.
On their honeymoon, they’d recruit like-minded folks: a misty-eyed Murphy (Ranbir Kapoor in the 2012 release Barfi! ) teaching them sign language to communicate with each other, a Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance in Steven Spielberg’s The BFG released earlier this year) physically collecting the right dreams to help them fantasise harder, or an adult Ishaan Awasthi (Darsheel Safary, in Taare Zameen Par, 2007 ) at one of his high-profile art exhibitions. Perhaps Yann Tiersen and Danny Elfman would score their futures together.
And perhaps, they’d allow a gawky college teenager, who once saved a reporter from a spiralling truck and burning tree, to write about them.
Because today, I don’t belong to their little universe. I don’t think I can fall for another movie character anymore. For I can’t dream anymore, not on my own account at least. A dream is now a reaction to truth, nothing but lucid amalgamations of what-if moments. And dreamers, merely inventive incarnations of disillusioned realists.
There’s nothing magical about heightened escapism. This whimsical world today forces us to dream, more as a last resort. It’s not the same.
It isn’t one for an adult writer’s carefree trances or a Parisian girl’s balmy idiosyncrasies. Evidence lies in the kind of cinema we make, the glorified stupors we sell: forced superhero franchises, reboots and endless fantasy adaptations. The images we see are those conceived by minds desperate to dream, not prone to dreaming, visual effect orgies parading as organised nightmares. But the accordions and pianos have gone silent. Blue eyes have lost their sparkle.
Heaven knows, this age needs us thoroughbred dreamers. Now, more than ever. But nobody knows where to find us. We’re not fantastic beasts, just negative assets managers in a digital world. To answer that question now: the craziest thing I’ve done is existing 30 years without doing anything crazy.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
