JUGGLER By Deepika Khurana (English)

One clown. Two identities. A truth that refuses to stay buried.

Bobo, a dwarf, believes he has found a place in the world when he joins the Triumph Circus as a clown. The costume offers shelter; the painted smile, permission to exist. Yet beneath the greasepaint lies an unanswered absence — the unresolved murder of his closest friend, a wound time has refused to close.

Moving through rituals of forced laughter and rehearsed delight, Bobo inhabits two selves: the fragile clown the world finds amusing, and Sikander — the boy shaped by a brutal past, carrying memory like an unpayable debt. When the circus is unsettled by the ringmaster’s enigmatic death and the shadows thicken with the arrival of a ruthless petroleum mafia, his private search for meaning slips into a struggle for survival.

Juggler is less a mystery than a meditation — on identity, on the violence of being seen only as a spectacle, and on the quiet courage it takes to demand truth in a world that prefers illusion. Taut, intimate, and unsettling, it asks a lingering question: when the mask becomes your only protection, what does it cost to remove it?