Nothing but the truth

By Fayza Hassan
My grandmother used to say sometimes that I had le diable au corps, which literally meant that I had the devil in my body. By the time I was six, I was convinced that I was inhabited, if not by the devil himself, at least by a maleficent underling who was lodged not in my body but in my mind. Physically lazy, I directed my brimming creative energies into crafting mini-dramas. I was not simply evil, as my grandmother often implied. Rather, I was inordinately interested in the relation of cause to effect: If I told my nanny that my grandmother hated her and intended to fire her on the first pretext, what would happen then? If I informed a servant that he was suspected of stealing, would he break down and confess, or would a row ensue? If no tragedy developed, I could always casually mention to my mother or grandmother what the servants had said, omitting of course my own role in the account.
I never made up stories out of nothing, which would have been, I was aware, committing the sin of lying. I was careful always to base my anecdotes on solid grounds. Reporting what I had heard in my own, more colourful, words did not figure as such in any of the lists of "don'ts" that had plagued my early childhood. I did not invent; I just rearranged the truth to make it more striking.
Even in those days, I was convinced that life had a very sloppy way of proceeding. Rewards did not follow good deeds immediately, nor did punishment trail wilful malice. I felt that events needed to be helped along to reach their necessary conclusions. In my small way, I was trying actively to assist destiny. I am still convinced that I was never motivated by personal gain or the desire to avoid a reprimand. I was always prompt to confess my mistakes, and sometimes owned up to those of others as well if I felt it would make a better story.
When my brother began to walk and talk, my field of action grew considerably. Although I loved him dearly, I could not help "inspiring" him to perpetrate the mischief I dared not attempt myself, and at first he was always unwittingly willing to oblige. I soon graduated from feeding him a whole packet of biscuits (but he just threw up, an event not sufficiently momentous to allow me to spin the prepared yarn as to how he had grabbed the packet and stuffed all the biscuits in his mouth at once, like an ogre) to mentioning what fun it would be to jump up and down on my mother's high bed (had he tumbled off his perch, I was ready to wail that I had tried to stop him but to no avail. He never fell, however; one of the adults in charge of supervising us always caught him in time).
By the time my brother was three, he had caught on, unfortunately, and did some ratting of his own, telling my mother that he had acted at my suggestion or even contradicting me if I concocted a particularly interesting tale. I began to dread the clear baby voice that announced "that is not true" after I had gone into every detail of one of my "specials." Unintentionally, my brother had begun a fashion that plagued me for the rest of my life. Not only did my family begin to take my fabulations with a grain of salt, but my sister joined him in exposing me as soon as she was able to talk. I deplored my siblings' lack of imagination and, in time, decided that they were unworthy of becoming accomplices or even protagonists in my endeavours to bringing order and logic into life's occurrences.
My storytelling gifts were called upon once more after I was married, when my husband discovered that I could get us out of unpleasant obligations without blame, and with elegance to boot. I was always coming up with imaginative yet plausible reasons for tardiness, an oversight, or simply a lack of enthusiasm to perform a task. Tedious invitations were my forte and it was with the greatest dismay that I heard one day the clear voice of my baby daughter, so reminiscent of my brother's, piping "that is not true" as I was explaining to one of my husband's boring acquaintances how our car had broken down on the way to their house. "The place was completely deserted, no telephone, no one to rescue us, imagine our distress," I was elaborating, quite taken by my fabrication, when my daughter butted in. "We went to see Tony last night," she added truthfully. As soon as we were alone, I explained that "mothers always tell the truth," and that she was never to contradict me. "Not even if you tell a lie?" she asked. "A lie becomes the truth when I tell it," I stated firmly. She wasn't convinced. Later, her sister was also infected with the same need always to "tell it like it is."
Neither of my children ever told a lie, not even if it was going to save their lives.
In vain I pointed out that the naked truth was just that: naked. It took a superior mind to clothe it appropriately in order to make it attractive to the listener. Did they not see that lies had to be introduced into Paradise, to break the blissful monotony and put some zest into the lives of its first dwellers? They were not amused and under their regime, I eventually learned to stick to the mind-numbing truth in order to retain my parental authority.
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