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Anything that Avinash Arun trains his lens on (Killa, Paatal Lok) becomes a 360 degrees sensory experience, a world so immersive that it is hard to come out of. The question then is: will the story-telling be as compelling? ‘School Of Lies’, his eight-episode web-series now streaming on Disney Hotstar, keeps us engaged, more or less.
‘Main toh roz bolta hoon jhoot. Toh kya hua (I lie everyday, what is the big deal?)’, says a little boy to another at a private boarding school. It’s a statement that makes you smile, not just because the speaker is bathed in such guilelessness, but also because there’s so much truth in it. Some little boys (and girls) are expert liars and grow up to be even more expert manipulators. But there’s a difference, even if it is semantics, between a harmless fib, and a deliberate, hurtful lie whose consequences can spiral out of control.
To lie is human. To acknowledge those lies, and face the consequences thereof takes gumption and courage. Arun’s series, set in fictional hill-station Dalton Town, delves into one of the most common human weaknesses, and comes up with a bunch of troubled, twisted individuals who feel real. What is striking is how it asks us not to judge any of these characters, but to present a series of extenuating circumstances which can force people to act in ways they have no desire to: some tragedies are accidents waiting to happen.
It opens with a hook which sinks right in. Twelve-year-old Shakti Salgaonkar (Vir Pachisia) is absent from a class. He is not to be found in his dorm, nor in the infirmary. As the day wears on, mild concern turns into full-blown anxiety, and we begin meeting the characters who may or may not be directly involved, but are certainly hiding something: housemaster Sam aka Samuel Mahender Singh (Aamir Bashir) who appears to have more on his mind than just a boy missing on his watch, counsellor Nandita (Nimrat Kaur) who is the primary caregiver to a sick father, the missing boy’s mother Trisha (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) who is out of a marriage and in a relationship, two senior boys Vikram Singh (Varin Roopani) and TK (Aryan Singh Ahlawat) who know more than they let on, dodgy school gardener Bhola (Nitin Goel) who doubles up as a drug supplier, and whose son Chanchal (Divyansh Dwivedi), a true child of nature, spends a great deal of time with Shakti, wandering over hill and dale.
Boarding school rituals, some innocent like tuck-boxes and hidden drawers filled with contraband, and some not-so-innocent ones like keeping-the-lip-zipped whatever-the-cost are on display, and are mostly done with authentic insider knowledge. The most tragic character, almost Grecian in the way he is written, is Sam the housemaster: as a victim of child abuse and generational trauma that’s hollowing him from the inside, Bashir is excellent.
Amongst the strands not as impactful as they should have been is the depiction of the cruel discipline-bondage bit between some masters and students; another is an attempt to portray the pain that comes from infidelity. These threads, including one on child trafficking, seem to have been stuffed in, without enough time given over to teasing them out properly, and the parade of downbeat, broken characters makes you long for some sunshine.
But all of it is made up for by the youngsters across the board: we saw how good Arun is in getting a bunch of kids to be themselves in ‘Killa’; here, too, it is the kids who are all right, even when they are not.
School Of Lies cast: Nimrat Kaur, Vir Pachisia, Aamir Bashir, Varin Roopani, Aryan Singh Ahlawat, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Nitin Goel
School Of Lies director: Avinash Arun
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