Smoke And Mirrors

CHAPTER 11: Changes

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Later, they would point to his sister's death, the cancer that ate her twelve-year-old life, tumours the size of duck eggs in her brain, and him a boy of seven, snot-nosed and crew-cut, watching her die in the white hospital with his wide brown eyes, and they would say, "That was the start of it all," and perhaps it was.

In Reboot (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2018), the biopic, they jump-cut to his teens, and he's watching his science teacher die of AIDS, following their argument over dissecting a large pale-stomached frog.

"Why should we take it apart?" says the young Rajit as the music swells. "Instead, should we not give it life?" His teacher, played by the late James Earl Jones, looks shamed and then inspired, and he lifts his hand from his hospital bed to the boy's bony shoulder. "Well, if anyone can do it, Rajit, you can," he says in a deep bass rumble.

The boy nods and stares at us with a dedication in his eyes that borders upon fanaticism.

This never happened.