There is a quiet joy in catching a movie in the cinema before reading the book or scrolling through critic reviews. It lets you form your own firsthand interpretation, untouched by anyone else's bias. I never judge a book by its cover, a home by its appearance, a family by its behavior, or a movie by the crowd it draws. There are so many untold stories tucked between covers, bricks, people, and empty seats.
On a weekday noon, I found myself hurrying to the movie hall to catch Last Man in Tower. A week after its release, it had already begun to fade from the screens. Two shows each across four halls in its first week had shrunk to three shows across three halls by the second. When I settled in, there were hardly eight people in the theatre with me. So, don't judge the empty seats.
Last Man in Tower is a film adaptation of Arvind Adiga's 2011 novel, and its story unfolds like a slow ache. It follows the struggle between a builder and the residents of a housing society in Mumbai, a struggle that is really a mirror held up to greed, desire, memory, values, and ethics. What struck me most was how every character believed themselves justified. No one saw themselves as the villain of their own story. That, perhaps, is the quiet complexity of human nature.
These struggles are not new. They echo through generations, playing out between parents and children, between siblings, and between cousins who once shared the same courtyard. Families have sold ancestral homes, divided shares among themselves, and moved away in search of greener pastures and newer dreams. Behind every house that was sold, every wall that was demolished, and every home turned into apartments and later redeveloped to hold more people than it ever intended to, there is a story that no one ever tells.
If you listen closely to these stories, you will find the same threads running through many of our families: greed, desire, dreams, and memory.
In our own lives too, we are often confronted by the greed of others, pulled into their moral compass, made to act against our own instincts while we quietly justify ourselves and play the victim of circumstance and choice. And maybe that is the truest, saddest truth of all. Perhaps many of our dreams are meant to be shattered and memories erased before they become fossilized.
But some things resist erasure. The songs and the cast of Last Man in Tower will remain in my heart forever, tucked away like all those untold stories between covers, bricks, people, and empty seats.
