At the turn of the last episode, Storyteller part 1, you got a glimpse into how and why the four boys came into being. Maybe the reason isn’t as dramatic as you would have hoped, but things hardly ever are.

You are never warned with a dramatic musical prelude before you meet a life altering event. Seriously, when was the last time you consciously knew an event you were living was actually going to be life altering? The thing is, events like these come up, rattle the little cage that is your life, turn things upside down, and leave; changing you as a person. And you don’t stop to wonder how it changed you. You go with the flow.

And then you only return to it in hindsight. Years later, when the sun is about to glide below the horizon, calling it a day, do you look back and wonder about that singular moment in time when you changed.

Because wonder is all you can do.

Grief is perhaps the one topic many a book has been written on. There are endless research papers, endless shows, endless whatever medium of entertainment or information you consume that cover grief as a subject. I suppose, after love (and maybe death, though I’m not entirely certain about that one), grief is what has captivated people’s interest the most.

You know about those five stages of grief? Purely academic, I’m sure. Because when you actually find yourself in the deep recess of that unimaginable pain that is grief, you don’t care about the stages. All you see is… bleakness, desolation. That inhospitable desert where no tree grows and no animal can survive. The ground is impenetrable, and the cracks on it lacerate your feet.

In the wake of Anpag’s disappearance, and the fate that befell him, a kind of fracture developed in his parent’s lives. Much of it, as his mother notes in this episode, was self-inflicted; but there is someone else she blames, someone she is mightily angry with.

And that rage won’t subside.