A Game of Fabricated Lies

Courtesy Copilot Designer

Fiction

At some point in K’s narrative, I became enlightened. He’s telling the truth pretending it to be a lie. No lie can have such emotional underpinning. That realisation was my enlightenment.

We were a group of nine men, all sexagenarians like me, gathered at Adithyan’s residence for an alumni get-together. We were meeting together after many years though a few of us met each other once in a while on some occasions like a wedding or a funeral.

While the third round of drinks was being poured, Dominic said, “Hey, why don’t we play a small game before dinner?”

Each one of us had to speak about himself for three-four minutes continuously and tell only lies. “Telling lies credibly is a political skill and a literary art,” Dominic added.

We all took the game with the characteristic enthusiasm of intoxicated nostalgia. Dominic started the game on everyone’s insistence and spoke about his sleeping through a landslide that had brought down to slush almost the entire neighbourhood, and his heroic contributions in the voluntary services that followed. He seemed to be retelling the story of a movie he had watched recently with himself replacing the protagonist.

RK (as Radhakrishnan was called) spoke about his expedition to Antarctica. Being an environmentalist, he knew how to embellish his lies with enough facts to make them more credible than political speeches in a post-truth world.

Yusuf spoke about his being detained in the Denver airport on a mistaken identity. What baffled us was his knowledge about the largest airport in the US though he was a grocer all his life in his nondescript hometown. Later we learnt that he was speaking about the experience of one of his distant relatives whom he had met recently.

When James mentioned his visit to a brothel, we all burst into a raucous laughter and Manoj reminded him that he was supposed to tell a “credible” lie. James was an incorrigible introvert. Even a whole year’s psychological counselling and countless retreats at Kerala Syrian Catholic Church’s eschatological centres (which I always hear as scatological centres) didn’t help him come out of his tortoise shell. He spoke as softly and cautiously as ever. But his visit to the supposed brothel turned credible to us when he touched upon the temporary sexual impotence he experienced as he saw the sex worker lie before him with her legs looking like a formidable M. When he concluded his story with a confession that his “thing” wouldn’t stand up even today because of that encounter with an imperious alphabet in a brothel, we didn’t know how to respond. There was utter silence which was broken by the host Adithyan who asked his Bengali manservant to bring in more “touchings” (bites).

It was K’s turn next.

“Let me tell you a fabricated autobiography,” he started and then swilled his third drink as if he was wreaking vengeance on someone. “Credible lies, okay?” He gave us a thumbs up.

“Hooray!” Dominic yelled and raised a toast with his glass of brandy.

“I chucked my job at the university because of my wife,” K started. It sounded quite natural in the context because Mathew had said something like “You know why I never play chess with women? Because I hate losing my queen” as part of his ‘credible lies’. Mathew’s misogyny was well-known in the group.

I smirked. I knew, like the others in the group, that K and his wife loved each other very much. Theirs was a love-marriage back in those days when arranged marriages were the only option for most aspiring Malayali brides and grooms. K was a newly appointed lecturer of English language and literature when he fell in love with a young clerk of his college. Their romance bloomed like Vrindavan throbbing to Lord Krishna’s flute renditions. A decade or so after their wedding, some discordant notes began to be heard in Vrindavan’s music. Rumours began to spread among the Malayalis in the little town of Itanagar and they reached me quickly because I was a part of the rumours. The others in the present gathering were not aware of this part of K’s life. K’s friendship with me was projected as one of the chief causes of his rift with his wife who reportedly asked him once whether he was gay. I wasn’t amused and I not only cut off the relationship with K but also left the place altogether. I was tired of the place anyway where I was teaching in a secondary school and was looking for an excuse to throw up my job at the age of 40 and take a leap of faith to Delhi all the way from Itanagar.

Now in K’s “fabricated autobiography,” his wife became a possessive siren, beckoning him not from afar, but from her anchor with him, playing a jealous tune in their Vrindavan whose Krishna and Radha had died long ago. The siren’s song drowned his freedom, K said, “in the tides of her love that clung to me like a massive barnacle. So I ran away in order to save me from her. I left my professor’s job at the university because there was too much love at home.”

Everyone except me laughed. They all knew about K’s romance and his personal Vrindavan. None of them was aware of what had happened in his personal life. They believed that K had left Itanagar because he wanted to go and work abroad which was what he did. They clapped hands and raised a toast to K’s lies which were the most credible in their judgment. They were too drunk to notice the quiver in K’s voice as he said the last line of his story.