One of my oldest childhood friends has spent his entire life in our hometown. He remains a classic creature of habit. A few college years aside, he has somehow contrived to let the same space connect his adolescence and adulthood. He is now married, and lives in a bungalow right next to his parents’ identical bungalow. They purchased his house, broke down the neighbourly wall and share the same porch, all so that their little boy remains well within their shadows. All, so that their boy never feels the need to become a man. They sheltered him for so long that he found a wife who reluctantly shelters him, too.
His life feels designed by those surrounding him. Everyone in his vicinity seems to be playing a role so that he doesn’t realise he is being looked after. And so that he doesn’t know he is being looked at . He forms perhaps the most common dinner-table conversation behind closed doors. Most of us discuss him because we don’t want to discuss ourselves. Common friends speak about him for hours, powered on by his glorious lack of self-awareness. These same voices indulge him endlessly in person. His invisible “condition” is dissected, analysed and judged as if he were a soap episode.
Mirroring fiction
I’ve always wondered why his story – one that is a non-story for several urban atomic families – has bothered me. I’ve always wondered why I feel like I’ve seen it all before. Only recently, it struck me. Everything I’ve written could well pass off as the plot for Peter Weir’s innovative 1998 satirical hit, The Truman Show .
In the film, Jim Carrey plays the good-natured Truman Burbank, an unsuspecting global star of an around-the-clock television reality show. His world – an artificial town called Seahaven Island – is essentially a giant closed dome on a Hollywood lot, populated with residents who are actually professional actors chosen by the autocratic creator of the show, Christof (Ed Harris).
Truman has no clue that thousands of tiny cameras capture his life as raw “entertainment”. He doesn’t know that everything, from his parents to teachers to friends to diseases to his young wife, is a lie. He is a human experiment, with real emotions shaped by choreographed events and personalities.
Truman is a tragedy.
Truman is also my friend.
Both of them sound over-respectful – almost fake – in their verbal interactions, only because they’ve been shielded from spontaneity. Fakeness is all they’ve seen. Every time I visit him, I enter a giant bubble in which he’s made to exist the way his parents want him to. I feel like Sylvia, the one “unscripted” girl from Truman’s past who wants him to see the signs. She sees in him a child that deserves to grow, and love, independently.
Isolated reality
At times, I’ve been made to feel as hastily ejected and rejected as Sylvia. The way Christof has her removed from the show when she tries to warn Truman, I too was kept at a safe distance on his wedding day. When it was time for the groom’s closest friend to carry out certain customs, his parents chose a “sane-looking” colleague of his instead. This boy had never spent a night out with him. He was their cameo, an actor of their choice summoned to keep their son suitably in order. They were perhaps worried that my beard and jetlagged gait might have reminded him of the life he never had; an identity they had kept him from.
His sentiments – or lack of them – are modulated by experienced performers that don’t want him to suspect the possibility of a heady, outside world. The bubble keeps him inside their little universe, away from the gazes of those who consider him the long-running protagonist of a show capturing their imaginations. He is their hero and victim, villain and slacker, son and brother, underdog and lost cause. They care for him, but only as much as their roles allow them to. They switch off the channel as soon as it’s bedtime.
He has come close to uncovering the facade. He comes closer every time we meet. I see in him sparks of the curly-haired kid who once rebelled against his folks by flunking his board exams. His dreams were still alive back then. But he was categorically discouraged; if he aspired to be a sportsman or restaurateur, he was reminded that he had failed enough to not warrant any “risky” life moves. They made him a lawyer.
I’ve often imagined the scene where schoolboy Truman is brazenly told, “Too late, there’s nothing left to discover” by his teacher when he declares grand ambitions of being an explorer. The map shown to my friend, too, is a customised one. Nothing else except an island of two bungalows exists on it.
Even his vacations are carefully planned to keep him true. They do not contain the kind of elements – alcohol, intimacy or nostalgia – that could sway his preprogrammed desires. They are filled with familiar characters, routines and politically correct company. Just like Christof instilled in Truman the fear of water so that he could never escape Seahaven, vegetarianism was instilled into my friend’s persona as a crippling defect. He can’t survive without a specific type of comfort food. It limits his intellect. The patriarchal obsession of watching cricket has been drummed into him, too, so that he can never truly look past the claustrophobic confines of Indian culture.
Different worlds
Whenever he visits Mumbai for cases he’d rather not argue, I make it a point to meet over beer. I try to talk about things other than cricket or food. For those few hours, he almost sounds like he is on a boat sailing serenely across the man-made ocean after a storm. I feel like a character gone rogue, desperate to drop more clues. I keep expecting this boat to puncture the wall of the dome. I keep hoping for him to recognise the absence of cameras and scrutiny. But then, his parents call. His wife calls. The beer stops. And he never signs off with, “In case I don’t see you – good afternoon, good evening and good night!”
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
