Weeks later, Arjun watched a new trailer from the app: a fresh title and a new list of names. The company kept installing itself in doorways and inboxes, a cinematic conscience for an era of cheap edits and curated selves. Some artists loved it, others sued. Headlines called it performance art, vigilante filmmaking, therapy-by-notification. Arjun stopped the app from auto-updating, but he left the icon on his phone—an uncomfortable bookmark.
When the app finished, it didn’t show a home screen. Instead, it asked a single question: WHO ARE YOU HERE FOR? Arjun typed his name out of reflex. The app responded with a list of three films—untitled at first, then each title crowning itself as he scrolled: "Ledger of Lies," "Exit Interview," and "The Small Profit." Each poster was a photograph of someone he half-recognized: a schoolmate he’d ghosted, a former boss he’d undermined, the barista he’d been rude to one rainy morning.
Arjun laughed, because what else could he do? He told himself it was theater. He set the old player humming. The DVD’s menu offered a single extra feature: "Play Your Scene." He pressed play.
The install progress bar crawled. As the clock ticked, Arjun remembered the summer he watched a Badmaash short at a rooftop screening. It had been a prank on the audience: an empty stage, then a single phone call that revealed the theater’s private messages projected on the screen. People laughed, called it brave; others called it invasive. That was the company’s genius—turning discomfort into applause.
The screen showed his apartment from an angle he did not know existed: the bookshelf with the book he’d pretended to have read, the mug with a chip he had hidden from guests, the key he’d used to open a drawer in his roommate’s room once. In the footage his roommate—Ravi—sits down, face empty. He speaks directly to the camera: "You always thought you could edit yourself into a better person. We’re showing the raw cut."
Badmaash Company movies never promised redemption. They promised confrontation. For Arjun, the install had been a jolt: a mechanical nudge toward honesty that also asked what one was willing to do after the truth left the screen and entered the room.
Curiosity pushed him into "Ledger of Lies." The film began like a documentary—raw webcam footage, shaky hands recording confessions. But the confessions were things Arjun had never told anyone: the time he pocketed a colleague’s idea and called it his own, the way he lied on his CV about a skill he barely knew, how he watched a neighbor struggle and pretended not to hear. He felt the skin on his neck prickle. The voice on the footage used phrases only his old friend Mira used. He hadn’t spoken to Mira in years.
Arjun inhaled. He thought of Mira’s laugh, of Ravi’s quiet kindness, of the barista who had fixed his order without complaint. He stood up, walked into the recording angle, and turned the camera toward himself.