Seven Ages of a Lying Man

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Seven Ages of a Lying Man

They say that everyone remembers their first kiss. I doubt it. Born during the height of the Second World War into an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family in an ultraconservative society, my first kiss was on our wedding night (no lies here). It happened at the ripe age of 36 on a stuffy moonless night when there were more pressing matters to attend to.

But I distinctly remember my first lie. It happened at the tender age of 3. Since then I must have lied a hundred times, but they were pure routine.

I have a great regard for Truth in the Abstract. Left to myself I would never have uttered a single lie. I am not one of those artistic liars who lie compulsively even to themselves. All my lies were forced upon me by others.

Though a ‘super’ dramatist and a ‘sensitive’ poet, Shakespeare was also an ‘able’ Accountant: he broke up the Life of Man neatly into Seven Ages, as is well known. I think I can cut up and package my lies into seven ages and stages of my life (such as it is):

1. Innocent Lies (below 4)
2. Student Lies (well known)
3. Teacher Lies (little known and less advertised)
4. Interview lies (for career advancement)
5. Marital lies (both pre- and post-)
6. Financial lies (PF Loans)
7. Smiling lies (ripe old age).

I now dwell on the first and the last.

First the last, the Smiling Lies. At 66 these are uttered mostly to my mother (87) and to my wife (59).
My mother asked me soon after my son’s marriage what my daughter-in-law’s salary was. I smiled and lied that I didn’t know.

A week back I did a crazy thing: going alone in a taxi touring South India for a week. On my way back I dropped at my mother’s place. She promptly asked me what the trip cost. I smiled and replied that the driver is my good friend and doesn’t charge me a single penny and drives me around with me by his side in the front seat, just for the pleasure of my witty company.

She too smiled knowingly.

I hunt all over Hyderabad for used books and get hold of a couple of very old bound volumes of antique Wodehouse donated or sold or got rid of by the great-grandson of a book-lover who bought and read them with pleasure a century ago.

My wife asks me what they cost. I reply: ‘A million dollars’.

I now come to my first lie which I cherish.

I was 3 and was playing marbles in our village street one afternoon. My father was busy penning a post card in which he used to squeeze about a thousand words of calligraphy (he ought to have attached a magnifying glass). There was then a sudden uproar as some old lady in our rented complex spotted a green snake on a green tree in our compound (she must have been on the lookout; no TVs then). My father was summoned to do the needful and he was too chivalrous to refuse.

But since it was past tine for clearing the neighborhood post box, he sent me to the Village Head Post Office with a complicated instruction:

I was to post this card if he didn’t have any incoming mail. If there was any post card meant for him (no one ever wrote anything but post cards thon), I should bring back his outgoing card without posting it, along with the incoming card.

The thing looked pretty clear to me.

But when I reached the Post Office, our ‘Friendly Neighborhood Postman’ cuddled and lifted me and showered me with stinking kisses (I must have been pretty cute or he never saw a kid of 3 handling a post card). He snatched the card from me, defaced it with a thud, and tossed it into its pigeon hole.

I was trying to swiftly return home to my playmates, but he stopped me and asked me to wait. He then scanned his stack of ‘Incoming Sheaf of Cards for Delivery’, and found one for my father.

He handed it to me asked me to RUN!

On my slow and pondering and thoughtful and guilty walk back home, I tore up the nasty card in my hands (which felt like a slithering slippery green snake) into small bits and pieces and scattered them all along the roadside one by one.

My father was back at his desk and asked me if I had posted the card. I said ‘yes’. He asked if he had no incoming cards. I said: ’no’.

I had eaten the forbidden Apple in my Garden of Eden and never looked back.

Oh, well! I am no George Washington, who was too truthful to be scared of his father in the Cherry Tree episode. But he was 6 then and his father was no Headmaster!