Quite possibly, nothing at all. Or nothing that would make sense to anyone but me. But here’s my glib-sounding answer: the emotional kavacha. The armour that protects you from the world, hiding your vulnerability below a covering of toughness, or nastiness… or goofy, laugh-track-accompanied jokes.
Matthew Perry, who died in October, was a favourite of mine – going back to the early years of this millennium when I watched every Friends episode multiple times as the show was telecast daily on two Indian channels. But if it has taken me this long to write about him, it isn’t because I was coming to terms with the loss. I just preferred to binge-re-watch Friends instead and to remember a time when the sarcastic Chandler Bing became the last of a series of lonesome types whom I strongly related to – characters encountered between childhood and my 20s across literature and film.
The first of those was Karna in the Mahabharat, which is where the kavacha comes in. As a young reader, when I first became obsessed with the luckless Karna, I wasn’t thinking about subtext – but I may have intuitively grasped that the divine armour, attached to his body until he cuts it away in one of the epic’s most stirring passages, had a symbolic function too. I understood Karna’s anger and resentment towards those who knew their place in the world and were comfortable in their own (regular) skin. And I wasn’t surprised when, many years later, I read the first analyses of the armour as emotional cover, protecting him not just from physical weapons but from the world’s barbs – while also adding to his defensiveness, helping him nurture a sense of persecution. And how a major growth in character occurs around the time he rids himself of this albatross, opening up, and accepting his destiny.
All this sounds solemn, but whenever I pictured Karna in my head, I saw him as a sarcastic man, capable of being very cutting, and genuinely funny at times. I felt he had to have a sense of humour – even if it was something like the sardonic quality that Amitabh Bachchan brought to some angry young man roles. But I rarely, if ever, saw such a Karna in the many Mahabharat books I read (or in the TV show): those either turned him maudlin, on the cusp of weepy self-pity, or (in the conventional tellings where the Kauravas epitomised evil) a bad guy who was maybe somewhat less bad than the others.
I was well into adulthood when Friends entered my orbit, but Bing would fill this humour gap with his protective kavacha (‘Back then I used humour as a defence mechanism. Thank god I don’t do that anymore’).To repeat: I know not much connects Chandler and Karna (well, they both have parent issues. One doesn’t know who his progenitors are, the other has Kathleen Turner for a dad). But at different points in my life, and in broadly comparable ways, they became people to identify with, helping me articulate things about my inner world. I didn’t fully appreciate Chandler at first, but soon I saw that his exaggerated, hysterical comedy was central to his function as a Greek chorus. In other ways, he was the most poised and responsible of the six friends – despite being set up as the guy who keeps making jokes which the others tolerate or roll their eyes at in the way that an adult might be indulgent of a prattling child. (The implication almost being that they could, if they chose to, say equally funny things, but were too mature for this. Utter nonsense.)With Chandler (and maybe even Perry), there is a sense that the ‘immaturity’ is mainly performative, always with a tinge of self-awareness. And unlike my childhood hero, he doesn’t need to lose the armour to become more human. It turns out that you can drily comment on the action around you, even while being part of it.
Or as Chandler might say, ‘BING!! part of it.’
