School of Lies Disney + Hotstar show review: When innocence is lost, lies rule

Nimrat Kaur in School of Lies, streaming on Disney + Hotstar. (Screen grab)

‘Yes, as practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.’

‘So we can believe the little ones?’

‘Yes, Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of a thing.’

‘They’re not the same at all!’

‘You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet - (Death waved a hand) - and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there’s some… Some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point -’

‘My point exactly.’

- Terry Pratchet, Hogfather.

A 12-year-old runs away from boarding school, and the school hide the fact. The schoolmaster, the senior boys, the runaway’s best friend, the counsellor, the parents lie and lie again to protect their own little secrets. But as a worried mother attempts to ask questions, the secrets that everyone in the school wants to hide stumble out.

It’s a dark, rainy, misty Dalton Town boarding school called RISE. And when the sun comes out, you know that it’s going to throw light on the grit and the grime. It is the ugliness that will rise from the steaming pile of lies.

The cast is enviable: Amir Bashir (schoolmaster Sam), Nimrat Kaur (school counsellor Nandita), Sonali Kulkarni (Vikram’s mother), Geetika Vidya Ohlyan (Shakti’s mother), Jitendra Joshi (Shakti’s estranged father). But it’s the young actors, Varun Roopani (Vikram, the senior), and Aryan Singh Ahlawat (TK, the other senior), who steal the show.

Shakti, the boy who wants to run away, thinks that the school is a fishbowl that is now too small for him. His partner in crime is little Chanchal (Divyansh Dwivedi) who is the gardener's son. Chanchal wants to run away because he thinks that a babaji living up in a cave will give him a key to power over villagers who called his mother names.

The schoolmaster Sam is abusing two senior students - Vikram and TK - and is wracked with guilt about it when the news of Shakti having run away from school reaches him. Nandita tries to interrogate the kids kindly to try and understand why Shakti ran away and if they knew anything about it. But she cannot handle her own life of lies easily. She has a disabled parent to take care of, the parent who did nothing when she was undergoing a childhood trauma… Should Nandita now ignore a parent in need? Vikram’s relationship with his mother is also a story of role reversal. He questions his mother like an adult would. He tells his girlfriend, ‘I have to be the man of the house!’, but the girl doesn’t know about Vikram and Sam Sir. Murli. Shakti’s best friend, his bunkmate, gets lessons from Shakti, ‘You cannot tell the seniors the truth, you have to tell them what they want to hear…’ Lessons of survival from a little boy to his mate hit hard, hit home.

Avinash Arun Dhaware, the director of the excellent show Pataal Lok on Amazon Prime, focuses on the dark, disturbing truths hidden underneath the lies. It’s a great story for OTT viewers, but the idea of a universally accepted half-truth comes out too. That parents send their kids to boarding schools to ‘fuck in peace’ (as Shakti’s mother confesses in rage).

Boarding school movies in India are either horrendously kitschy, filled with precocious kids as in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Student of the Year, or filled with Gulzar’s lyrics of nostalgia and hope of Aasman ke paar shayad aur koi aasman hoga, / Badalon ke parbaton par koi barish ka makaan hoga… (Rockford). OTT shows like Candy (2021) did delve into drugs and murder. This eight-episode school tale is focused on this mountain of lies and although it touches on child sexual abuse and sexual orientation, it chooses to keep guilt and the psychological drama to a minimum. It is up to the audience to understand the guilt and the pain the young lads are going through.

It is true that the parents don’t really understand their teenage children or are happy to make them fit into traditional roles. But the writers of the show need to do more than just present reality. It’s a responsibility no one wants to shoulder. That’s why TK will always have a secret fridge no one knows about. The show could have been so much more than the red flag it raises about abuse in boarding schools. Alas it ends up being the secret Nandita is unable to share with anyone.

School of Lies is streaming on Disney+Hotstar from June 2.