Journalists often meet people who prefer to remain anonymous. But recently I talked to someone whose anonymity I immediately wanted to protect. Naming him, I realised, would mean laying bare much more than his identity. It could bring down some of the great walls of fiction with which he’d surrounded himself. So, for the purposes of this column, let’s just refer to him as Ashfaq.
Ashfaq hasn’t a clue who his parents are, or where he was born. He doesn’t know whether he had been lost or abandoned as a child, or if he’d actually just run away. Consequently, he has grown up alone, living in different institutions all his life. Twenty one years old now, he works as a tourist guide, getting to interact with different people of different nationalities every day. While he enjoys the work and the tips he gets, having to make polite conversation with strangers is one part of his job he often finds tiresome.
“The first thing people ask is where I am from. I hate such questions as I have no answers to give!” he told me. So, Ashfaq has devised a novel way of dealing with such questions. He tells tall and fantastic tales about his birth and heritage that change with his moods. “Sometimes I say I’m German. Since I have picked up a smattering of the language and have read a lot about obscure places in Germany, people have actually believed my fibs!” he grinned. At other times, he has told unwary but insensitive questioners that he is originally from London. “Faking a British accent isn’t tough for me since I have a good ear for languages,” he said. Ashfaq also loves to weave fictions about his family. “Sometimes I wonder who my father is. I have told people that he could be the king of an erstwhile princely state who has never acknowledged me. At times, I’ve made myself out to be the unacknowledged bastard son of a super-rich industrialist. And when I feel I have a particularly sympathetic audience (usually middle-aged ladies) I talk about how I tearfully reunited with my parents 15 years after being lost in a mela…” he recounted.
Telling tall yet believable tales isn’t a piece of cake, Ashfaq told me. “I have to do my homework well. So I read about the places all over the world that I’d like to live in so that I can sound convincing. I also practice speaking different languages whenever I can,” he said. “Nothing gives me a bigger high than realising that I have finally convinced sceptics that my lies are all true!” Ashfaq said that he didn’t lie for any material gains (but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not). This was just an amusing way for him to deal with an otherwise tough situation — and also to cock a snook at people who created such situations for him.
As we shared a cup of tea, I wondered why Ashfaq was so open about the fact that he lied. Was he protesting against social conventions that slotted people on the basis of where they were from and who their parents were? Was he just being ultra-sensitive to questions that most of us just took for granted? Did such questions, even when asked innocently, remind him painfully of what he was missing? Whatever his motive for lying, one thing was clear. The tales people tell can sometimes reveal more than truth itself. And while truth sounds boringly absolute, falsehood opens up an amazing world in which anything is possible. In many ways, the world of fakery and fiction is much nicer than the real world out there. I know Ashfaq would agree.