Sambasivam had retired from the Lalgudi Taluk Office with a pension, a steel trunk of old files he never opened, and a conviction that the world was full of wrong facts which only he could correct.
It was not that he cared for great truths. Questions of God, the soul, or the future of the nation he left to the people who wrote in the *Lalgudi Gazette*. His passion lay in smaller things. When was the clock tower near the bus stand built? Sambasivam said 1912. Ramu the barber said 1914. Which was the best season for mangoes from the groves along the Kollidam? Did the actress in the new Tamil picture come from Trichy or Tanjore? On each of these he held a firm opinion, and he defended it as if the fate of the universe depended on it.
"You are wrong," he would say, sitting up in the barber's chair with half his face lathered. "Absolutely wrong. My father saw the foundation stone laid with his own eyes."
"Your father was in Madras that year, sir. You told me so yourself last Deepavali."
"That was a different year! Now listen…"
Ramu would stop shaving, the razor raised, and the argument would carry on until the next customer coughed meaningfully. Twice Sambasivam had walked home with one cheek smooth and the other bristling, because he could not concede.
At home it was no better. His wife Kamakshi had long since stopped arguing with him. She just said, "Yes, yes, you are right," in a voice that made him feel he had lost, which annoyed him even more. At the Sri Krishna Vilas coffee house, the proprietor began finding reasons to visit the kitchen whenever Sambasivam came in. The neighbour across the lane, a mild schoolmaster, had started using the back door.
"The trouble with this town," Sambasivam told Kamakshi one evening, "is that nobody respects the truth."
"The trouble with this house," she said, setting down his tumbler of coffee, "is that the truth has to be fought for every day, even about the price of brinjal."
He did not answer. That night, though, he lay awake on his mat longer than usual.
A few days later he was walking past the pavement booksellers near the Saptharishiswarar temple. These men spread their wares on gunny sacks: almanacs, cheap detective novels, Sanskrit primers with half the pages gone. Among them he spotted a thin, mildewed volume by an Englishman called Arnold Bennett. He bought it for four annas, mostly because the bookseller had insisted on a price of eight and Sambasivam could not resist the pleasure of winning the argument.
He read it on his pyol that afternoon, with the sun slanting across Kabilan Lane. Most of it was about making good use of one's time, which did not much concern a retired man. Then he came to a passage that made him sit very still, as if someone had called his name.
He went inside, found an old office diary, and copied the words out in his careful clerk's hand:
*Truth is indestructible.
The truth will be out.
Truth is never in a hurry.
There is nothing cosmic in truth about trivia.
If I am right, when the truth is out, my reputation will be consolidated.
If I am wrong, then it is better for me that I have not been too positive.
I am not the sole custodian of great truth.
I was not brought into the world to be a safe-deposit of truth.
I am not the President of the Association for the Propagation of Truth.*
He read it three times. "President of the Association," he muttered, and to his own surprise he laughed, a short dry sound that made a passing cow look up.
From that day he gave the diary a place in his morning routine, between his bath and his first coffee. He sat cross-legged on the pyol, closed his eyes, and recited the lines under his breath. Kamakshi, watching from the doorway, thought at first that he had taken up some new devotion, and secretly lit an extra lamp before the household gods in case it was serious.
The real test came on a Saturday, at the barber's.
"You know, sir," said Ramu, stropping his razor and not looking at him, "I was telling a customer yesterday. Clock tower, 1914. No doubt about it."
Sambasivam felt the old heat rise in his chest. The words *Absolutely wrong* were already climbing up his throat. He gripped the arms of the chair.
*Truth is never in a hurry*, he told himself.
"Is that so," he said aloud.
Ramu paused, razor in mid-air, and peered at him as if checking for fever. Then, uneasily, he went on shaving. For the first time in many years Sambasivam walked home with both cheeks done.
A month later, while he was in the Taluk Office on some pension business, an old colleague showed him a dusty register from the town records. There it was, in faded copperplate: *Clock Tower, near Bus Stand. Foundation laid 1912.*
Sambasivam's heart leapt. He asked for a copy of the page, folded it into his shirt pocket, and set off for the barber's shop at a pace he had not managed since his fortieth birthday.
At the corner by the temple tank he slowed down. Then he stopped.
*If I am right, when the truth is out, my reputation will be consolidated.*
The truth was out. It sat in a register, and it would sit there long after he and Ramu and the clock tower itself were gone. It had no need of him to carry it through the streets like a man bringing news of a war.
He bought a packet of jaggery for Kamakshi and went home. The paper stayed in his pocket until the dhobi found it a week later, washed to pulp.
"The house is very quiet these days," the schoolmaster across the lane remarked to Kamakshi one evening, coming in through the front door for a change.
"He has resigned," she said.
"Resigned? From what?"
"From the presidency," she said, and would explain no further.
Sambasivam, on the pyol, heard all of this. He opened his mouth to correct her. Strictly speaking, he had never been elected. Then he thought better of it, closed his eyes, and let the evening go by.