The figure of the Big Bad Wolf is central to fairy tales about the fears and trials of childhood, and there are many variations on the character. The Wolf doesn’t have to be the villain-in-chief: he can be watching from the shadows, a potential rather than explicit threat. Or he might be revealed to be something very different from the bogeyman of the child’s nightmares (see Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird). But that doesn’t necessarily make the nightmares any less vivid.
In the Red Riding Hood story, the Wolf has big, sharp teeth and reckons that the little heroine might make a tasty dinner. The villain of the new film Stanley ka Dabba isn’t that fearsome, but he’s a nuisance at the very least — a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. The role is played by the film’s writer-director Amole Gupte (who also wrote the very popular Taare Zameen Par) and his portrayal reminded me of the avaricious shopkeeper in Vishal Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella — a man who thinks nothing of taking a little girl’s precious umbrella away from her.
Though Gupte plays a khadoos in Stanley ka Dabba, his own empathy for the interior world of children is visible throughout this nicely-written and acted — if somewhat unevenly-paced — film. It’s about a boy named Stanley (wonderfully played by Gupte’s own son Partho), popular among his classmates for his storytelling skills — though none of them realises just how good he is at making up fictions about himself. We sense early on that something is wrong when he tells a colourful but unconvincing story about fighting with a bigger boy, and when he makes a hurried phone call to an unseen mother to tell her he’ll be late coming home from school. But things come to a head when Stanley has a run-in with Verma, the Hindi teacher who insists that he bring his own lunchbox to school. In the face of adult hegemony of this sort, the happy-go-lucky boy starts to wilt.
As it turns out, this story (minor spoiler alert) is leading up to the revelation that Stanley is an orphan who spends his non-school hours performing menial tasks at his uncle’s rundown little dhaba. The end-credits turn this into a commentary on child labour in India, complete with relevant statistics. I was ambivalent about this ending — I thought it was a little too hurried and facile, with too much centred on the revelation. But there’s no doubt that cinematically speaking, the film’s structure is a well-executed bit of viewer manipulation — it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer, by giving us a seemingly middle-class, Convent-educated boy to identify with and then presenting him in an unsettlingly different avatar at the end.
What I personally found more interesting was the way the film lightly hints at Verma’s human side. This isn’t done in an obvious or sentimental way, and there is no real attempt at redeeming the character — certainly, his back-story is never revealed to us in the way that Aamir Khan’s teacher in TZP was revealed to have been dyslexic himself. But Verma’s last few scenes make it possible for us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It’s possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise. In any case, he is by no means the only — or the most dangerous — wolf in the little boy’s life.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer