And here we move on to the last of our main characters in The Arrival…

Chan Ranbir

Chan Ranbir

Chan is very much a driving force of The Arrival – for both the right and wrong reasons. A short-tempered genius, the father of the Ranbirs is stern, influential and a figure who looms over the family’s future.

Chan wants two things – for Clockwork to be a success, and to have his family part of that. In some respects he thinks that’s one and the same, and as such it creates one of the major problems for the family.

Reading Yomi’s original script made Chan into a very harsh figure. Which is perfectly natural. The Arrival is told through the eyes of his son, Janav, who only sees the move to England not in terms of building a future, but as a destruction of the young boy’s past. And as we take in the story through the perceptions of a slightly bitter eight-year-old, Chan comes across as a bit of an ogre. However, deconstructing that reveals a man driven by his passion to be a father to a better society, rather than merely being a simple obstacle for Janav to overcome.

Chan Ranbir, Master Kineticist

True, Chan can be seen as overbearing, but the intriguing thing that stood out when peeling back the layers of his character is that he is a man of the future. He is such an important part of the Clockwork Watch universe – a main cog, if you will – that he is one of the few characters in the story who has his eyes firmly set on what’s yet to come.

Which is the biggest problem for Chan. After all, the large irony of a man who has his sights on everything ahead of him, tends to be short-sighted to the things closest to him…