Chapter 1

I can’t remember when I told my first lie, or even what it was about.
And I don’t even remember the first time I told a lie and realised how useful it was, the good lie, told so convincingly that it was a feat of the tongue.
What I do remember though is that, at a very young age, I was told not to lie for it would lead me only to hellfire and damnation.
Good ole hellfire and damnation. It’s served many a disciplinarian well, at least the Catholic ones I first met at boarding school.
I was just five years old when I was despatched to St Brigid’s in Colombo, behind my elder sister Mohini.
St Brigid’s was a large, sprawling property overseen by Irish Catholic nuns and catering to children from kindergarten through to Grade Twelve.

Here I was introduced to a culture obsessed by the virtues demanded by God and the saints, where prayer and hymns figured in large chunks of a typical day. We prayed first thing every morning, coerced from our beds at an hour when it was barely light to recite a litany from a two-sided, fullscap sheet of prayers. We prayed before meals. We prayed before study. I’m sure we even prayed while we were scratching our bums.

Every morning we trouped in an orderly queue, our veils upon our heads, to the church where a full mass was said. They were dreary affairs.

I saw the inside of that accursed church to mark every saint’s day and at least bi-weekly confessions where I struggled to think of what sins I might have had the chance to commit inbetween the hours I was forced to spend in church.

There were benedictions and several funerals. Every time one of the nuns went on her journey to the Heavenly Father, we children were required to walk around the body usually placed on display in the main aisle of St Brigid’s church.

This was a diversion we generally despised. Dead nuns, I must say, have little to recommend them in the way of entertainment. I was only a small child and my eyes were usually in line with the edge of the open coffin.

I would have to stand on tiptoes to view the corpse’s nostrils where usually little flies would collect in eager anticipation of the process of decomposition that would follow in due course. I have to say that to this day, when I see those little flies, I invoke again the scent of rotting lily petals and that stale talc smell of a dead nun.

Corpse-viewing aside, we boarders recited an umpteen rosaries each week. From time to time, we would be marched to a grotto outside the church where a statue of the Virgin Mary would be lit up by way of some artfully positioned incandescent bulbs. There was nothing Steven Spielberg about it. No special effects to suggest to us this was really the Holy Mother reincarnate. The globs of dry pigeon shit on her blue veil were a giveaway.

Here we’d be forced to kneel on the road, our bony little knees bruised by gravel, and pray to Dear God that the torture would be over soon.

And we recited the Ten Commandments by rote until they were implanted in our brains. Amongst them THOU SHALT NOT LIE.

As a good Catholic girl I learned that the Holy Scripture condemns lying as absolutely as it condemns murder and fornication. In fact, I knew people were not even allowed to lie if it meant saving a man’s life.

I blamed Saint Augustine. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of him! He was opposed to lying in any way, regardless of the consequences, no ifs or buts. In fact, he reckoned that if the truth was difficult, then it was better to be silent if possible.

The Saint had said: “If a man is hid in your house, and his life is sought by murderers, and they come and ask you whether he is in the house, you may say that you know where he is, but you cannot tell: you may not deny that he is there.” It’s the fine print in religion I love, don’t you?

Aristotle in Ethics seemed to agree when he said that lying undermines character and in the long term, makes it more difficult to achieve a good life.

Luther concurred, too. “I consider no vice on Earth to be more damaging than lies and disloyalty,” he had said.

Plato, on the other hand, excused lying in some circumstances, particularly for heads of State for whom he saw lying as a “privilege” which might be applied for the public good. Doctors also were excused. More fine print!

For the rest of us good Catholic girls, lying was absolutely, a mortal sin.

*

But if telling lies was so bad, why did we do it? I often wondered.

Some brain analysts claim that lying is a sign of cognitive advancement. It takes a fertile and high-functioning brain in order to create a lie. In other words, lying is not for idiots.

In fact, we begin lying around the age of two or three when we start to realise that we aren’t always being watched and there are some lies we can get away with.

As four year olds, typically we stretch the truth around once every two hours, while the average six year old will have his nose grow about once every 90 minutes. The general motivations include gaining an advantage, staying out of trouble or self promotion. These were motivations I would become familiar with. But more on that later.

Older children become even more skilled at lying.

Why? Because lying is a skill of survival.

Human beings as a species will lie to avoid trouble and its repercussions; to preserve reputations; to avoid hurting someone’s feelings; to increase stature and reputation; to manipulate; and to control information; we lie to gain an advantage; we lie to stay ahead.

In fact we humans lie for one of a hundred reasons.

But I would discover my own.

I Shivanthi Simbilage lied simply because I found it the most natural thing in the world.

*

Lying is not for the half-hearted or the faint-hearted.

It takes courage, guts, balls!

You can’t dip your toes into the mean, cold depths of lying. You are obliged to dive in, shouting ‘Geronimo’, stilletoes and all, with no regrets.

There’s no such thing as a partial lie just as there is no such thing as a partial swim.

Lying is an act of immersion. There is no skimming of the surface.

Once any statement or situation involves what might be construed as only a bit of a lie, then the whole statement or situation becomes part of the lie.

It’s a bit like saying that a worm-eaten apple is only inedible on the side the worm is living in. You see? It doesn’t gel does it?

As for the justification of lying, I’m with Saint Augustine. There can be no claims of enabling the veneers of civilisation – of protecting another’s feelings, of maintaining cordial relationships, of easing another’s lot in life.

No lie can be justified. It is what it was. It is not a truth. It is not a half-truth.

There is no sleight of hand that truly transforms a lie into a virtue.

No matter how you hold it up, a lie remains a lie.

But here is the thing I would eventually discover.

Learning not just how to lie, and feeling comfortable with lying is only half of the story.

The other half is the sheer exhilaration, the freedom, the sense of achievement and power that is the result when an otherwise ‘good’ Catholic girl discovers the creativity of a really, really, damn good lie.

It is as if the three lemons on the poker machine light up in unison.

There is a hallelujah I can hear in the heavens.

There is a tingling sensation in my cheeks.

It is that, that satisfaction I remember as opposed to the exact nature of that first times I lied with cunning and intent.

This was not like the lie I’d told when I had broken my mother, Mirabelle’s favourite vase. When Mum had asked who had done it, I had replied “Nobody”.

This was not the lie I’d told when I had placed the family cat into the cage containing my mother’s prized macaw. When Mum had asked who had done it, I blamed my innocent younger sister, Lakshmi, turning a deaf ear to her sobs as my father, Malcolm, paddled my younger sister’s backside.

This was the kind of lie that took purpose, that required a talent of invention, and most of all, required me to repaint the dull colours of my mundane life into a blinding kaleidoscope of impossible colours that were as stunning as they were absolutely credible.

It was the kind of lie that was so big I was sure no one would believe me. And then, when my lie was eaten up in one credulous gulp, it produced a feeling that had no equal.

It distressed me that I could not quite remember exactly what lie had first lured my on the path to damnation.

It must have been a good one because I had certainly been damned by it, at least in one way.