I thank Joseph Conrad. For he made Marlow lie in Heart of Darkness. For he probed an exploration into that lie. For he introduced the idea of a “good” lie.
A bunch of Conrad’s readers are debating a lie. If I tell my ten year old sister that I’m favouring someone lying because he or she was forced to do so under an “extraordinary circumstance, I’m inviting the possibility of the most perplexed look on an acne-free face. Yes, this is because when she woke up in the morning she was apprehensive about using the eternal excuse of a stomach upset to skip the one millionth activity that Sprindales School chose to organize in six months of a session, she was apprehensive about pouring the milk down the drain and telling her mother that she gulped it, she was apprehensive about telling the volunteer at the gate that she wasn’t on time because the Naraina flyover was jammed. Three lies for her, three statements capable of rendering a potentially ghastly consequence.
Since childhood we’ve been trained to not lie. A lie is a lie, right? Even if it saves you from a day of boredom at school when your best friends decided to skip it because their hormones started going berserk too early in life. Even if the milk makes your mouth stink and you don’t have the will and the time to brush all over again. Even if you know that the prissy volunteer at the gate saw the principal casually walking around the school and decided to build an impression by catching the senior in junior school who arrived five minutes late. You’ve lied to save yourself (when no cause was waiting to kill you).
How complex can one make the whole process of lying? I mean when you grow up you hide the fact that you’re going ten kilometres away to Khan Market under the veil of walking down till CCD. It’s the distance. Walking to CCD is an insult because it takes less than two minutes. So you know that when Ma is calling the food is lying on the table and she thinks that when you reach, the steam coming from the bowls will not die down. You lied. Even though the justification is not articulated brilliantly, you lied. You know it. You lied.
Lying sometimes becomes so habitual that it can make one forget how it would feel to have actually told the truth. It is possible that your parents are busy socializing themselves and they’d be happy to know that you’re eating a meal in company, even if it’s not there’s. But it’s so safe to lie. The action succeeding the lie is so well-guarded that all the tension is cooled off .
Even though you’re swaying incessantly to Losing your religion which is almost on loop at Route 04, your mother thinks you’re still at theatre practice. So yes, you were. There’s the half truth in that which is the complete truth for your mother. You’re not modifying the truth. You’re letting her believe that what she thinks is the truth, is stretched for a few more hours. “I didn’t alter her knowledge of what I’m doing” is equal to “Ok, I lied.”
You’re lying and you’re always doing it consciously. Am I scaring you? Is your karma getting horribly distorted? Is the lying going to teach you a lesson? Come on, I’m not trying to turn on that spiritual switch. It’s ok, we all say small lies. However never deny, that that was a lie. It was born to be a lie. It will live it’s life as a lie. You might say it and it won’t provide a lens to the blind eye. For better or for worse, it’s always a lie.
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