There are so many words I don’t know. I used to be able to do crosswords, but I just can’t get my mind around them anymore. Every time a word with more than six letters appears in even the periphery of my vision, I start. Not violently, you understand, but with a kind of half-pleasurable, half-surprised feeling. Because I am reminded always-always- of a tall, myopic plunderer. A creature who leaked in when I wasn’t looking.
But let me not be vague. Let me start at the top, because that’s where Arun always said you should start.
And because Arun was always right.
Some of us have sixth senses about future events, about tomorrows that may bring ecstasy or grief. A seventh child of a seventh child (how lonely that must be!) can sense phantom presences walking among us. I have a gift, too. I can tell when someone is lying. Right off, I know that the truth is being layered, or twisted, or simply ensconced in a velvet quilt of deceit.
This is not the easiest of gifts to unwrap and use.
When I was a girl, I would go and fetch milk for my mother. It was not a long walk, ten minutes at most, but every second of that trudge would terrify me. Something about the duplicity of the gray-green sari of the old washerwoman trundling along ahead of me, the dishonesty of the dawn light, the facetious guile of the milk vendor, all set my heart thudding. I could never tell anyone about this fear. They would only have laughed – and made the usual remarks about me having too much imagination, (not considered a virtue in a girl), and slyly hinting to my tight-lipped mother about their aunt’s sister-in law’s brother who would make a very suitable groom for her troublesome child.
I grew up very slowly, it seemed. My parents’ every white lie burnt a deep blue blister into my beliefs. Their social niceties made my insides churn. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy were my personal bogeymen. College was a morass of falsehoods, each of which coloured my perceptions a cloudy shade of mud. I learned early on that the truth is a rare commodity indeed.
My realization of my oddness crept up on me - I thought everyone saw through lies, that everyone was flooded with a colour when confronted with deceit. And so I didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything for a long time, convinced that this was just part of being alive. When finally I did realize I was special, that lies were stained glass to me alone, I embarked upon a series of tests.
Everyone failed.
My closest friends were liars.
My parents were liars.
My colleagues at the newspaper were liars.
No one told the truth all the time.
The reasons were immaterial to me - white lies, politeness, tact, fibs, fabrications, canards - all fell into the mixed bag of deceit. They all flooded my mind with angry hues and stopped me thinking.
And then I met Arun.
To Arun, words were everything. He was an etymologist, one of the brightest in the field. For him, words embodied life: they were the fuel for his brilliant thought processes, they were his chosen gods of worship. For him words were truth.
It was simple: he never lied. It never occurred to him to distort what was. When I was around him, I was colourless.
The first time he came into the room, , I felt a soothing splash of white on my soul-washing away the years of vibrant colour, the multihued stains of untruths and half-truths and falsehoods.
I don’t think he even noticed me, to begin with - I was just another sub-editor whose desk he passed when he came to hand in the week’s daily crosswords and the Sunday brain-teasers.
But I hung around him, hung on his every word, basking in the clear beige of his honesty, the very colour of the milky coffee we drank together in the canteen.
I listened to him - listened a lot - it didn’t matter that I hardly talked, hardly expressed my opinions - just feeling the no-colour of truth that hung around him was enough to satisfy a need I had felt since I could think.
I thought about letting Arun into my secret, about explaining to him my horror of the lie and the cooling balm of his honesty. However, it occurred to me, love-addled as I was, that the story sounded a bit pathetic, nothing like the mature, intelligent listener and yes-nodder I was playing to Arun’s academic, intellectual holder-forth.
Okay - so I was being a bit of a wimp. I see that now. But he seemed so perfect, so uncluttered, it was hard to stay objective, to stop myself hurtling down the ravine of infatuation. He talked a lot- the others made faces behind his back when he held forth, even called him a windbag, a bore, when he wasn’t around.But it was all wisdom to me. And it was the truth, pure and unadulterated.
I couldn’t ask for more.
We were married in June. I quit the paper to become a professional listener. My opinions mattered very little. If I did venture a comment, he looked at me patiently, a long-suffering adult hearing out a retarded child. We did crosswords; he explained how each word was born out of a root as involved and complicated as any human life, meandering through generations of use and misuse. His passion left me dumb-founded, but my mind was unsullied, uncluttered, empty of terror of the lie. The feeling of cleanliness remained my mainstay, his truthfulness the backbone of our marriage (though he didn’t know that).
The very colourlessness of my life amused and soothed me.
But one day Arun came home, and his usual beige was tinted at the edges by a pale lilac. He had stayed late at the library, he said.
The next time he came home late, the lilac had deepened into a turgid purple, and was bleeding threateningly onto the beige.
By the third “Sorry honey, got held up in a meeting,” the colour I was seeing was a dark, deep, unqualified red.
At first I could not react. I felt something I can only describe as the shade of the hour before you wake in the morning – gray, meaningless, not real life, a dream.
And then there was an anger, a rush of fury that matched in intensity the tint of his lie.
I felt betrayed, I felt the angst of the cheated wife, I felt waves of deep-staining colour that tainted my bleached happiness. The red grew from deep within me... it emulsified and fermented into a froth of crimson. How unfair it was, I thought melodramatically, to have perfection and then have it taken from you, how cruel!
That last time, he stood by the door, looking at me oddly, like I was the one painting his life with an upside down brush, like I was the artist of the pigment of destruction, when in reality, he was. He was the dauber of pretence and deception in my happy, nothing-tinged life. This was one canvas that could not be allowed to be painted.
He was saying my name, over and over, in that tone of voice that usually suffused me with white, the soother, the calmer - he knew this worked when I was upset, but of course he didn’t know why: that he was my curfew when riots of colourful lies overwhelmed my mind, that he was my censor against the obscenity of deception. But now my protector had become my attacker - his lies shooting sharp barbs of indelible dye at my heart.
I got up and went to him slowly, looked him in the face, asked him who she was, took in the stuttering denial as if from very far away, and then raised my hands to his face.
He stopped talking then, and as I ran my fingers over his features, he stared mesmerized at my half-closed eyes. I caressed the contours of his cheeks, nose, chin; I stroked the origins of the lie that had destroyed the perfection. I tilted my neck upwards to receive the kiss that was a loud blue of guilt. Its intensity was great - I felt his tongue in my mouth, reaching out to heal the wound it had caused.
Then I watched the expression in his eyes change from aroused to puzzled to frightened and then terrorized. The muffled sounds coming from his throat grew higher pitched, and the shriek of pain was animal in its terror as I spat his tongue out onto the floor. He staggered back, his hands covering his mouth. The colour of the blood that poured from him, that covered my face, that I could taste on my tongue, was the same as the colour of his final lie.
I welcomed back the truthful shade of nothing into my life.
But I still can’t do crosswords.
