Would you accept all I say?

I had a friend. One day I got the news of her death. My world came to a standstill. As soon as I could, I went to her house to offer my condolence to her mother. We were sitting on the couch when I asked her mother how it all happened so suddenly. She told me that she returned from the market one day and found Anika dead. “She died because of poison used to kill pests. We had conducted a pest control in the house and apparently it must have gone into her lungs and she might have died because of that.” The way she behaved was weird. She was bent on sending us away from the house as soon as possible. I felt there was something wrong. Anika used to tell me that her father lived abroad for work and a distant cousin of her mom used to frequent the place. After Anika died, her mother immediately cremated her body, without even allowing it to be sent for a postmortem examination so that the actual cause of the death could be determined. When I told her that we should call the police for investigation, she told me that Anika was a peaceful girl and her soul shouldn’t be tormented with such brute investigations. Her near and dear ones would be questioned and tortured by the police, some might be arrested or accused, and that would be the last thing she would have wanted for the people she loved.

All the pieces joined together indicated that her mother had something to do with her death. Why would someone’s mother cremate her daughter’s body before an examination otherwise? Shouldn’t she have wanted to know how her daughter had died? Her mother had a “distant cousin” about who only my dear friend knew. Probably she had discovered some hideous truth about him. Maybe her mother killed her due to fear of being discovered.

When you read the story, all the things I told you indicated that her mother had almost certainly killed her daughter. Because the way I narrated the story, your mind was conditioned to follow the lead I was giving you, it  was like I was controlling your thoughts, channelizing them in a specific direction. But what if I now tell you I killed her, and all this was my cover-up plan? 

You would feel cheated. Because you were looking at the picture through my eyes. I could take you wherever I wanted, make you believe my story if you trust me.

When we talk about Manusmriti, for example, we refer to it for the base of all the stupid classifications of caste and their respective supposed-to-be professions. But what if Manu wrote it based on an idea he had of the world? What if it was a figment of his imagination which happened to please the men in power and hence it was promoted to be the undeniable truth?

So basically, if I write a book about having met god and Photoshop some pictures to make them look real and create a setup of a “god’s vehicle” having landed on earth last night and make it viral then twenty years later people might read about me in the religious textbooks and believe it just like we all are forced to believe that Sita went into the core of the earth after giving an Agni-pareeksha.  Some might worship me as a blessed soul to have gotten the opportunity to meet the almighty whom no one has seen and others might debate upon the authenticity of my story and the corresponding evidences.

How can anyone believe anything anyone tells them about their past? 

Wouldn’t it then be okay to say that a moment that passes can never be written or told exactly as it had passed but it would be just the interpretation of the expresser or his choice of how he wishes it to be remembered?

Can anything ever be recorded correctly then? Is all of history a real sequence of events or just people’s perspectives? Was there actually a cursed fruit in the Garden of Eden? Did Sai Baba really found diyas lit beneath the surface of the earth?

We base everything on peoples’ perceptions. Don't we?