Fictional facts

She had a fundamental problem maintaining her blog. People had started believing all that she wrote – in the sense, they starting putting two and two together, started relating every single word with her life. It was getting dangerous. She was partly to be blamed, of course. She was too lazy to add labels and tags like fiction, fact, story, semi-true, fully true etc. But the problem was not just others. The problem was her husband who was a devoted fan of her blog had also started making facts out of the fiction she wrote. So suddenly he’d come up with suspicious questions, out of the blue. Like, so do you really like chick flicks? or comments like, ‘I think a guy who has seen Gone with the wind 25 times is a pansy’. I don’t remember telling you I saw Gone with the wind…. The most baffling one was with a Shorshe Bata post she wrote about a jealous wife who made her husband eat MTR ready to eat food, despite making his favourite mustard fish, because she was sick of hearing him say, he missed his mum’s cooking. On reading that post, he was quick to correct, ‘ma cooks only occasionally, Amma, the cook, has been cooking at home for over 15 years in our house, you know’….a desperate attempt to tell her that he loved her food and couldn’t remember praising his mum excessively in front of her. And even more baffling was when her mother started calling her up from India, asking inquisitively ‘ I heard you aren’t feeding your husband well?’

She remembered what her friend told her recently- babe, Yes you do write well - because you observe well. But you don't steal. I plagiarize - relentlessly. From life. She wanted to call her right then and say, stealing she did, and that too pretty shamelessly. She stole from things around her, from the people she met. That’s how she wrote. Borrowed, stole, plagiarized from her neighbours, friends, parks, trains, supermarkets, comic character like relatives, crazy lovers, dogs, couples…

She borrowed heavily from couples, and made a story of her own. But she ensured she didn’t borrow too much to give them away. She probably picked their backgrounds, the way they spoke, the look of their living room perhaps. And then, she distorted the truth mercilessly. It gave her a strange sort of wicked satisfaction. Actually, come to think of it, it was not troubling her at all. She liked the fact that there was so much speculation around what she wrote, especially from her husband who had such a puzzled look each time there was a new post on her blog. It tickled her and pleased her. with an evil grin on her face, she resolves to write more of these…she rubbed her hands in glee and started punching keys on her keyboard, in a devilish frenzy.