Do you know any liars? I mean serious, extravagant liars?

Once some friends and I met for a late night ice cream at India Gate. Some people in the group were meeting the others for the first time. We were from Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru. In about 30 minutes it turned out we all had one person in common. A big liar I will call S. S tells lies of the scale that requires a nicer, fancier word: fabulist. And what we had each experienced at the hands of S so lit us up in fervour and unity that we outshined the monument behind us.

Here are the things S had pretended to be with each of us in each of our three cities. An ethnomusicologist, a documentary filmmaker, a music producer, Mallikaarjun Mansur’s student (couple of years after Mansur had died), a Coke executive in Atlanta, an editor of a Bengaluru magazine, the director of a theatre group and the editor of a volume of Queer Studies (that had a foreword by Judith Butler). I might be forgetting a couple other avatars.

S is a young man, good-natured in his own way, smart and affectionate. He has friends, I think. Friends who know about him, I think. It’s just S who doesn’t know, whose shape seems to shimmer before his own eyes, transforming without limitations or fear. Meet S at a party and he is likely to tell you that he owns the new fancy start-up everyone’s talking about. You work there too? Oops.

As far as I know, S has never tried to make any money or anything as mundane as that with his lying. He is not like the young guy who came into my compartment before my train left Chennai and told me that he had been separated from his friends and just wanted a little help to get back home to Hyderabad. I was fascinated by the props he had acquired to signal that he was just a middle-class college boy in a fix. The phone loosely held in his hands, the pants with many pockets, the sun-glasses stuck in his well-styled hair. The only thing that gave him away was his expression, unconvinced by himself.

S, on the other hand, was always convincing. It seemed rude to not believe him when he gestured languidly at whatever pile that happened to be nearby and said that he owned or ran it or was just about to buy it. Yes, of course, you find yourself saying, suppressing any potential giggles.

Apparently this is not a skill isolated to S though he qualifies for the Liar Olympics. As two UK-based scientists Shakti Lamba and Vivek Nityananda discovered in a study couple of years ago, “self-deceived individuals are better at deceiving others.” Could it be that for the brief moment that S was telling a young Pakistani writer that he had gangland connections, he really believed it?

Recently I remembered — almost with the nostalgia that you reserve for talented performers who once delighted you but then disappeared — another young fabulist. One whom I will call K. When we were teenagers, K had managed to convince the entire theatre community of my town that he was a savant arrived in their midst to save them. He staged massive, big-budget theatre adaptations of racy Hollywood movies, acquired liquor sponsors and veteran actors. I passed by billboards of his productions gawking, and read newspaper interviews of him gasping. He name-dropped with élan. Steven Soderbergh, Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts. He had met all of them, this little boy claimed, and everyone believed him. I lost track of him at some point but I believe there was some debacle. But a theatre friend and I asked each other fondly the other day: what happened to K?

I speculate often about one sub-genre of fabulists: journalists who weave full handloom weaves out of made-up facts and characters. Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, Jonah Lehrer. Why aren’t they afraid? And, more importantly, why don’t they write fiction?

It’s hard to feel angry with S or K, their lies being of the makhan-chor variety. But obviously there are big, fat lies and there are big, fat lies. In the same study, scientists Lamba and Nityananda write, “People may not always reward the more accomplished individual but rather the more self-deceived. Moreover, if overconfident individuals are more likely to be risk-prone then by promoting them we may be creating institutions, including banks and armies, which are more vulnerable to risk.” Why are banks handing out hundreds of crores to some dudes while fighting with you about EMI for a tiny 2-BHK? Now you have your answer. And suddenly it’s not so funny.

But the one thing I continue to wonder about. When they are at home, lying quietly in bed, what do liars look like in the mirror of their mind’s eye?

(Nisha Susan is a writer and editor of the feminist website The Ladies Finger)

@chasingiamb

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