COLUMN: TAHA KEHAR: A storyteller's sawdust

Ramiz often embellishes the truth with the occasional lies. Peppered with a storyteller's sawdust, his stories about our shared childhood often lose their cadence of truth and become the measure of his wild imagination. I should encourage him to write fiction. (I know he writes. I can recall, without the aid of a creative license, his sentimental diary entries that I'd secretly read as a teenager.)

It's strange that he uses fiction as a crutch to understand the past, make it more palatable. As a student and practitioner of design, my brother possesses a distinct visual vocabulary that captures the here and now, and shirks the stray impulses of what could have been.

'How can you say that?' I'd ask him. 'I was there when that happened. I remember it in a different way. Stick to the facts. Don't create memories.'

Over time, I've learnt not to reprimand him too much about his invented memories. (Ramiz derives a thrill from blaming the world for his own shortcomings. I don't want to be accused of gaslighting him.)

'Don't worry,' I now tell him. 'You have the perfect excuse. There's an area of memory studies devoted entirely to your condition. Some memoir writers tend to arrive at conclusions that are quite unlike those of anyone who is present for the events they're writing about. Write an autobiography and you'll have the creative license to invent the truth.'

With that remark, I can tell him to focus on writing (autobiographies seem more compelling when they're fiction-shaped and false) and justify the generous sprinkling of sawdust that pollutes his stories.

Unfortunately, I can't use those words to exonerate myself. For I too use the same sawdust in reverse -- and in private. The stories I write aren't the only stories I can tell. A cluster of untold stories swirl through my mind and I don't have the courage to allow them to spill onto the page. I guard them for discovery, hide them in the secret corners of my psyche.

I'm the protagonist of those hidden tales; you, however, are a fleeting presence. (Don't labour under the illusion that you're the only one who has inspired these untold tales. I've concocted similar stories about Sahir and the men before him. After you, these stories will be recycled, tailored to suit another man and then another.)

In these tales, the distances between you and me have blurred. Our lives have settled into a stable rhythm. Love -- that elusive, effusive state of being -- has cast its spell. We whisper sweet-nothings into each other's ears and find solace in fighting each other's make-believe battles. Our children -- unborn and unreal in the real world, astonishingly alive in my imagination -- surround us, solidify our union.

I can tell that you also harbour secret stories in your heart. Remember the time I asked you to close your eyes and imagine a situation that makes you happy? When you painted for me the landscape of your hidden joys, I noticed that the storyteller within you also likes to delude himself. You mentioned a house, a daughter who made you laugh and a partner you couldn't see. The last detail felt like a sly addition, an evil tease. But I knew then that our Gemini hearts were psychological twins, blinded by sawdust, bereft of reason.