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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.
Hari Om
ReplyDeleteAh... And now I wonder at how much written here is truly fictional... YAM xx
The actual get-together is next Sunday 😊
DeleteBut I didn't get any invitation!!
DeleteOften lies are more real than reality, like for the prisoners in the allegory of the cave, which you might still remember.
ReplyDeleteI remember Fr Joachim teaching that Platonic allegory rather dramatically.
DeleteYou are a wonderful story teller indeed!
ReplyDeleteThank you.
DeleteThe trick to a credible lie is to tell most of the truth.
ReplyDeleteYes, partial truths are often the most dangerous lies.
Delete