*A Web of Lies* It’s a funny story. Funny and sad; now that I look at it in retrospect. Now that I think of it, I can’t believe that I was that naïve. It was a lie I believed in with my whole heart, until I found out what was the truth. It shattered my trust, I have now been skeptical instead of sympathetic to every sob story I hear. I was in the tenth grade. It was a girls’ convent. There were few parameters of popularity and I did not fulfill them. I was part of a shy group, funny amongst my friends, known to a few teachers and that’s it. It’s not like nobody knew me. When you’ve been in the same school for long enough and the teachers keep shuffling classes to mix up the whole batch in every new grade, it is granted that everybody knows you. You may not be notorious, like the girl who shagged her boyfriend, or famous like the all-rounder who can dance, sing, is good at sports and even gets marks; but you will be known. When they are spreading a piece of gossip about you, the others will know who it is about, because in a school like ours, nothing escapes without being talked about. Anyway, this story is not about me. This story is about one famous girl who spun a web of lies, which now that I think of, were despicable. Let’s call her X. She was a particularly talented girl, a maths magician, she always scored a hundred in the term paper. While the rest of the class would puzzle over the maths problem, X’s hand was raised and ready, showing the teacher her correct answer. She had high ambitions, wanted to crack IIT and IIM, in fact she was positive that she would do that, and then go further in the field of scientific research. I know this, because X sat beside me and explained everything to me one day. So far in this story, there has been only the truth. And it will be the same further. I am misty on the details now, but somehow it came to this that she sat beside me in class. Now, she was a part of one of the famous groups in our grade. In fact, there had been just one group and because of her it had split up. I wasn’t aware of the exact reason for this group fight, but the rest of the grade knew that it was because one side was against X and the other side was defending her. Rumors spread especially quickly in a girls’ school and soon we came to know about the reason of this group fight. I have to say I was completely shocked. The reason was that X had cancer. The side that was against X accused that X was just claiming to have cancer. And the other side vehemently defended her, because they were her friends and they would agree to whatever she said. The bonds of friendship are funny. Sometimes they make people blind to the faults of their friends. The others called X a liar. They said that if she had had cancer, she would have chemotherapy sessions and that would have obvious consequences, signs of which X did not show. They were right. But at that point, her naïve friends would only call them hurtful people who were throwing meaningless accusations at a girl who was about to die. So, one day while I was sitting beside her, she told me her story. Told me about her aims and ambitions that would never come true because she was dying. She told me how her cancer was detected at the last stage and there was no hope for her. She was just happy that it was her and not her brother, because the disease ran in her family. She told me to write her story for her. She had a best friend, whom she had a fight with, for some reason that I don’t remember now. It was probably because of the lies she was telling. But then I knew only what she told me. I kept her secret, I never ratted it out to anyone. I wrote her story for her, I drew her a sketch for her birthday, a sketch of her and her best friend. I believed her story without giving it a second thought; because in my innocence I could not even think that someone would make a false claim to having cancer. She had bright eyes, a chirpy voice and could not sit still. Her energy vibrated from wherever she sat. Then, when she would look me in the eyes and tell me sincerely that she was dying, I believed her. I believed her because I did not want to question it. I did not want to think that why would someone ever claim such a thing. She was popular enough. Why did she need more sympathy? What was it that she wanted? Why did she spin a web of lies from which she could not free herself? Why did she break everyone’s trust? What need she had, what did she wish to fulfil, by claiming that she was dying? To this day, I still ponder over these questions. Because after the tenth grade, she vanished. She left school and never talked to any of her friends again. I got to know the truth couple of years later. And the girl who told me laughed at my naïveté. Maybe, somewhere in my heart, I had known her truth. Maybe somewhere I had known that she was lying. Somewhere I had seen the falseness in those large, pretty eyes. Somewhere I had known I was being trapped, and I fell in that trap willingly. I was willing to play the fool. But just that once. Sometimes you need a lie to awaken yourself to the truth, the truth that people are always lying. ~ Afreen
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:30:00 +0000