Midnight’s grown-ups

By Samanth Subramanian

For most of last year, practically every fortnight, I dialled a house in Troy, Michigan, trying to speak to a man I had seen in a film half a century old. Let me admit, up front, that I failed. T.N. Subramaniam was unwell when I first called, his wife told me, and if he ever recovered enough for us to have a conversation, I never learned of it; abruptly, in August, his home turned unreachable, the phone ringing endlessly away. No one called back. After months of searching for Subramaniam and thinking about him, I lost my chance to ask him the questions that had gathered, like giant snowdrifts, in my mind.

My obsession with the film he was in, “I Am 20”, began in the early autumn of 2013—a dispiriting season for India, a season vacant of cheer or promise. There had been a parade of bad news: outsized corruption, a gummed-up economy, politicking of wearying vileness. An uninspiring election was drawing nearer. The nation’s affairs felt soiled and beleaguered, and the very project of India seemed to have gone awry in some profound way. In this troubled climate, I watched “I Am 20” for the first time, and then dozens of times more, spellbound by its characters and by the messages it held.