​What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. – Francis Bacon
 
A soldier and his beautiful wife pass through a forest in a horse-drawn carriage and encounter a bandit who lives there. The soldier ends up dead. We wonder what happened. We hear four versions of what occurred: such as, the bandit raping the wife and killing the husband, or the wife seducing the bandit and prompting the bandit to kill her husband. We hear from the bandit, the wife, the soldier and the witness, a common man. This is the substance of Rashomon, Akiro Kurosawa’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made. It changed my life.

I had noticed, even as a boy, that what I was told as the truth was seldom the whole truth. In that sense it was not fully true. Less commonly, I had also noticed that what I was told was not true often contained an element of truth, however small. In that sense it was not quite false.
 
This astounded me. People around me seemed content to live in a simple binary, black-and-white world. Either something was true or it was false. What you said was correct or incorrect. It could not be anything else. I was discovering, however, that I could not throw out something as wrong because it had at least a speck of truth. It would be like discarding the baby, or at least a small limb of the baby, with the bath water. It might be easy and tempting to reject something as false, because you have found a flaw in it, but it may have a key shred of truth in it that was worth preserving. This was in my mind when I first saw Rashomon.
 
The Buddhists often cite a marvelous Confucian analect: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The teacher may not even be a person. It may simply be a book or a song, an event or an experience. Anything that helps you see something new, reveals an insight you were missing earlier. For me, Rashomon was that magnificent teacher.
 
A ghastly killing. So there must be a simple answer to the questions: Who killed? And Why? Kurosawa takes this basic situation and offers four perspectives, of the ostensible killer, the killed (through the ingenious device of a medium), the pretty woman who represents the ostensible motive, and an ordinary person, who happens to be an accidental witness.
 
You have no alternative but to listen spellbound to the four stories, one by one. When you hear the first story, you are persuaded that it is the truth, for it is quite plausible. Then comes the second story, just as plausible, and it upsets your grasp of the truth. By the third and fourth stories, you are watching a whirligig that keeps changing its color and it thoroughly undermines your complacent notion that seeing is understanding.

​I came out of the show, feeling moved but also pummelled. For the first time, I realized the immense and practical significance of Aldous Huxley’s phrase “that infinitely complex and mysterious thing called absolute reality.” If the truth was a complicated affair, so was life. If an employee, a partner or even a spouse told you something that did not accord with your idea of reality, how do you go about settling the difference? How do you allow for the possibility that what you have held as the truth is only a part of it, and what the other person is telling is also true? Perhaps both of you are partly right?
 
Some years later I was a juror in a murder trial. The jurors unaccountably settled on me as the foreman, and I felt a special sense of responsibility. It was a political murder. It was also a brutal one. Two people had held a man down on the desk in his office and a third had slit his throat. Twelve earnest persons sat down as jurors and we all wanted to be fair and arrive at the truth. But the process seemed designed to do something quite different. It was to fit all the facts, events and persons into rigidly defined legal boxes, no matter whether it led to the truth or not. The whole truth was not a distant but a forgotten cry.
 
So flustered I felt, a week later I took an impetuous step. Peter Ustinov – yes, the famous actor and playwright is also an adept story teller – has a beautiful story of a man who fortuitously watches an accident on the street and feels it his duty to offer his testimony to the police and later in a court. At every stage he is bullied, badgered and bad-mouthed, until he realizes that nobody – not the police, detectives, suing parties, their lawyers, even the judge – has any interest in the truth. They want to go by the law, which means by stultifying legal categories and maneuvers, that make the truth quite inaccessible. I xeroxed the story and presented it to the judge. He was not amused and pointedly asked me if I had respect for the law or not. I suspect I nearly got ejected from a juror’s seat. (In fairness, I must add that the judge later complimented me profusely on my perspicacity, when I presented him, on behalf of the jurors, a series of questions we wanted to be answered by the prosecution and defense.)

No, law courts are not the anvil for truth, no more than police stations or business houses or press rooms. The quest for truth must be in life quotidian, in the humble realization that truth is complex, many-faceted and elusive.
 
To sit and watch Kurosawa’s film may be a good first step.

A man finds his wife loves another man. She has been sleeping with the other man. The man gets a gun. He barges into the other man’s home. Bang, Bang, Bang. He shoots the fellow dead.
 
This scenario plays in many heads. We all hate someone and want him or her dead. To be cheated is not nice. You love someone and think you have the one to yourself, only to find the person cares for someone else and is sleeping with him or her. For a man, there is the added element of pride and pretension. To be cuckolded is humiliating. You feel you want to kill the guy.
 
But you don’t. That is whole point of being civilized. You divorce the person and go your way. Or you swallow pride and live on with the person. Embrace her in lukewarm acceptance or even love her with her perfidious imperfection. ‘Honor killing’ is vulgar and dishonorable.

​I was a young student in 1959 when Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati, a high official of the Indian Navy, took advantage of his position and obtained an official gun by lying to another official, then marched into the bedroom of Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja and pumped three fatal bullets into him at close range. Nanavati’s attractive wife, Sylvia, mother of their three children, had just told him that she was in love with Ahuja and intimate with him.
 
What followed was a maelstorm of histrionics and hypocrisy, hate and hero worship, machismo and mendacity, insinuation and innuendo, sensationalism and sanctimoniousness. India went wild. The focal point was a trial: the prosecution was highly uneven, the defense overly dramatic. But the evidence was overwhelming.
 
The killing was never in doubt. The killer had been too furious to avoid identification. The motive was not in doubt either. Nanavati was angry that Sylvia loved Ahuja and had gone to bed with him. He had killed his wife’s paramour in jealous rage, with ‘malice aforethought.’
 
His lawyers tried to make it seem a crime passionnel, but Nanavati had planned and obtained arms on a subterfuge. They suggested a provocation, claiming Ahuja told Nanavati he did not have to marry every woman he slept with, but this flew in the face on Sylvia’s earnest letters broaching marriage. Desperately, they imagined the scenario of a scuffle in which the gun went off accidentally, but the quickness of attack and close succession of the three bullets gave the lie to that. The autopsy and ballistic studies showed clearly there was no scuffle but a clear-eyed murder. Nanavati himself told a guard and a colleague that he had shot a man who had ‘connected’ with his wife.

The Indian public however saw a hero in the petty envious man. He appeared in the court inappropriately in the full regalia of his naval uniform, a World War veteran, the second in command of a battleship, who had killed a lecherous Lothario to protect his wife and home and upheld the honorable role of a man and a husband. He wasn’t even imprisoned, but kept pleasantly in naval detention. Men showered high-value bills on him, women their admiration and affection.
 
No surprise the jury voted overwhelmingly that Nanavati was innocent. The acclamation was thunderous. The judge, Ratilal Bhaichand Mehta, was not amused and declared the verdict perverse, one that reasonable people could not reach based on the evidence. The High Court reviewed the evidence and sentenced Nanavati to jail for life; the Supreme Court confirmed the decision.
 
Nanavati had hardly settled in his cell, before he was pardoned by the state governor, released, got a lucrative job, then shortly emigrated to Canada with his Sylvia and the children. He died in 2003.
 
I was young but I could not help noticing that nobody emerged unscathed from the affair.
 
The press, largely dominated by Blitz’s Karanjia, distorted rather than represented the reality and daily fed trifles like truffles to the public. The judiciary looked inept at preventing a gross miscarriage of justice, though the High Court later restored the balance, and the jury system became the victim of a quick, thoughtless overreaction. The navy seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between gracious support for the unfortunate and blind endorsement of a miscreant. The Parsee community, in which I had discriminating friends, seemed singularly indiscriminate in its backing of a wayward Parsee, and let the trial be a show of strength between the Parsees and the Sindhis, the victim’s community.
 
Outrageously, the government showed by its shameless pardon that if you know the right people, in this case, the Nehru family and Krishna Menon, you can literally get away with murder. Even more outrageously, the Indian society implicitly declared that honor killing is all right if someone dares to touch your prime property, your woman.

Sylvia perhaps emerged the worst. A pretty English girl, she married an Indian at 18, lived ill-at-ease with a mother-in-law in a country she was never at home, had practically no friends, produced and reared three children in quick succession, and met somebody she loved and wanted to marry, only to find him murdered by her husband.

All that was left to her was to continue in a loveless marriage with a man she now knew to be a jealous killer, stand uncomfortably in the witness box at the bidding of his lawyers, and be told in open court that, having lost her lover, she was obliging her spouse. Then remained the chore, on Nanavati’s release, of moving to a third land, unknown and friendless, and adjusting in middle age to a new life. One hopes Sylvia, in her eighties, had some peace in the end.

All my friends had roles in the school play, but I had stood apart because the principal had talked about regular rehearsals and punctual attendance. Regularity and punctuality did not sound like a lot of fun.
 
My friends would not let go of me. “Don’t be a spoil-sport. We can have a lot of fun doing this together.”
 
They enticed me even further by saying that I could have my pick of a role. I could take a look at the script, choose what I like and then they would all tell the drama coach that they didn’t want to do that role. It would fall quickly into my lap.
 
I read the script and knew immediately what I wanted. An all-powerful king struts about the stage, ordering his generals, harassing his ministers, pestering the hapless courtiers and, in general, being mean to his poor subjects. If I took the role I would not only wear a fabulous crown and resplendent robe, I could ask for a moustache and a beard and a pair of jewel-encrusted shoes. I would have a whale of a time ordering around my classmates and whoever else comes my way.
 
The best part of the role was its brevity. After doing his spiteful bit in the first scene, the king gets the news from a courier that his soldiers have been decimated by the advancing army of the neighboring king and he had no option but to surrender to his mortal enemy. So, stupid that he is, the king takes out his sword, spouts some eloquent words and kills himself. Thus ends the first scene.

I could visualize myself making a fiery speech, and as the audience gasped at my brilliance, dramatically taking a swipe of the sword and closing the scene with a ghastly suicide, no doubt to rapturous applause of the audience. I imagined our bespectacled snobbish principal melting in admiration and clapping his bulbous hands for all he was worth. I didn’t have much to memorize, the rehearsals would be short  for me, and, best of all, it would be all over quickly. I could go and sit in the audience with my father and mother and enjoy the rest of the play.
 
I told my friends I would do the play, and they in turn shortly confirmed to me that the king’s role was mine.
 
The mathematics teacher was the drama coach and, like most mathematics teachers (or so I fancied), was a nasty piece of work. An unflinching martinet, he drove us crazy with his demands. Memorization had to be faultless and delivery pitch perfect. I was glad when my hours of jumping through the hoops was over and came the day of the play.
​
The annual play was a big event. All the students and their parents came. The principal came with school board members and some bigwigs. The hall was packed, I could peek from behind the screen and was taken aback.
 
The make-up man was working feverishly on the characters to appear in the first scene. Came my turn. It felt icky with the tons of paint splashed on my face. When I softly asked, “Do I need any more paint?” the guy gruffly answered, “Do you want to look good or not?” Anyway he gladly added a massive beard and a matching moustache. When the clothes came, I was truly impressed. Glorious red and gold shiny stuff, duds appropriate for royalty.
Though there were no jewels, the shoes were pretty spectacular, with an uptilted nose and some kind of a stone on top.
 
I marched in as the screen parted for the first scene and began my starting harangue. Pindrop silence. The spectators were lapping it up. Nervous as I was, I felt inspired by a royal spirit. Imperiously I hollered at and hectored everybody in sight and my friends on the stage, in various docile roles, almost shrank visibly. I was getting a quick and early lesson in how a bully grows and how others help him grow.

​Then came the final part, my last hurrah, what was to be my pièce de résistance. I stepped to the front of the stage and started my peroration. Midway I placed, as planned by our disgusting drama coach, my right hand at the waist to take out my sword with a flourish. At that moment, I discovered to my horror there was no sword. No sword! How am I to kill myself?
 
I stopped my speech peremptorily. I had to. Then I half-turned and ad libbed, “Am I to believe that the morons who serve me have forgotten even to give me my beloved sword?” I said it with great feeling. That is exactly what I felt. I had been so excited about my regal accoutrements that I had quite overlooked the missing saber.
 
The little fellow from the junior class, who couldn’t be given a role and had been comforted with the job of the stage manager, was cowering in the wings with the sword in hand, fearing a tongue lashing for his oversight from the principal the following day. I went to the wings, retrieved the sword and returned to the center of the stage again.
 
“Ah, my best friend, my sword,” I ad libbed again.
 
Then I returned to the script, gave my dismal farewell speech and committed suicide. I fell with an audible thud. The screen closed.
 
Nobody noticed the mistake. Everybody thought I had done a good job. The next day the principal congratulated me and especially mentioned the thud I made when I fell. I didn’t explain that the coach had thought I didn’t have the appropriate regal girth and had inserted a piece of plywood under my royal robe, and, when I fell, I landed awkwardly on the plywood with an unseemly clatter.

​“Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.”
 
Pain is the ultimate truth.
 
One moment you are thinking about God and poetry and picturesque sunsets. You are talking eloquently about Thomas Mann and Manny Pacquiao. The next moment somebody delivers a Pacquiao-sized punch to your stomach. Art, nature and providence disappear instantly from your universe.
 
It doesn’t have to be violence. You could fall from your bar stool and break your wrist. You might receive a text message that your favorite child has lost a limb in a car accident. Your doctor could look up from a clinical report and tell you gloomily that you have three months, no more, to put your affairs in order.

Oh, sure, you have your moments of ecstasy. Your team wins the soccer tournament. You finally get the promotion you have been waiting for years. Your child tops the class and all the parents seem to think you are the architect of his success. But you know that your team was universally predicted to win. You got your promotion after many more years than unworthy colleagues. Your kid never accepted any of your suggestions and, who knows, maybe even scoffed at them with his buddies.
 
In any case the joy lasts for a few hours, perhaps a few days. After a week or two, what lingers at best is a vague sense of satisfaction. That seems the painful truth. Happiness seems slow to come and swift to evaporate. In retrospect, it looks fleeting if not trivial. On the other hand, misery seems eternal, at the least, intermittent and enduring. How do you forget your gorgeous dream-house that a cloudburst destroyed in an hour? Or get over the slip of tongue that wrecked your splendid twenty-year career? How will you ever uproot the ‘rooted sorrow’ of the beautiful child you lost to a bungled surgery? Such pains persist for ever, cloud your brightest days and haunt your ill-slept nights.
 
I did an exercise with my friends. I asked them to tell me of something joyful that happened in their life ten years ago. They had great difficulty recalling an event. When I reduced the period to five years, they recalled an event or two, but cited them hesitantly, as if they were embarrassed to cite something so trivial. In sharp contrast, when I asked them to tell me something tragic or disastrous that happened to them ten years ago, they instantly told me of an accident, a business reverse or a death in the family. Shortening the time range brought a flood of painful recollections. I don’t think of my friends as a mournful lot, yet the range of their memories and the speed of their recall left me in little doubt about what weights more on their mind.

If this is our lot, what should we do when we suffer?
 
You have no doubt heard of the stoic response. Suffer in silence, bear your pain with fortitude. What does not kill you, they say, makes you stronger. Be brave and endure is the motto of all military training and the theme of many a popular movie. But we know that soldiers don’t return from wars quite intact. What does not kill you can still kill your finer side and bury your compassionate instinct. My friend Vinay in California told me of a ghastly car accident: he survived and is perhaps a more cautious driver now, but it has forever robbed him of the pristine joy of driving on the highway without a care in the world.
 
Nietzche spoke of pain as a liberator of the spirit, but doubted that it makes us better, adding that it makes us “profounder.” I don’t know that pain has liberated my spirit, but it has certainly let me see things in a new light, even let me see new things. When my father passed away, the growing hurt made me realize how much of his breadth of spirit – different people, varied ideas – I had both imbibed and taken for granted. When, more recently, my colleague and friend Dilip closed his flagging eyes, how much his quiet guidance had supported me in my darkest days. I have come to love Léon Bloy’s remarkable words, “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” If you love and lose your love, you will know right away what the French gadfly meant about discovering new spaces in your heart.

​Then there is the other way of looking at pain. When the Italian coastal town of Herculaneum was excavated in 1765 from the ashes of Vesuvius nearly 1700 years after its interment, the Villa of Papyruses yielded the most eloquent statement of the utilitarian view that happiness or pleasure is really the purpose of life, pleasure minus pain being the best measure of its quality. Epicurus, who lived three centuries before Christ, and his followers thought that lasting happiness can only come from a peaceful mind, free of pain and fear. They suggested friendship, knowledge and a temperate life as the keys to such peace. The golden rule is: To live a pleasant life you have to live wisely and fairly – neither harm nor be harmed – and to live wisely and fairly you have to live a pleasant life.
 
I think of all this with a sense of shock. All the things we now think of, individually and socially, -- whatever else they do – can bring us neither reduced pain nor greater
happiness: better health, greater wealth, faster learning, higher intelligence, superior technology. None of these, alas, has the capability to make us happier and more tranquil than our neanderthal ancestors.
 
Our pain might continue a while longer.