The stories we tell

We package and brand ourselves, hoping our lives add up to something big

For years, I had watched my dad tell the same Army story whenever there was a family get-together. It is the recounting of a terrifying battle scene. On most occasions, his audience never let him finish his story. He seemed to forget that it was mostly a civilian gathering, and the military jargon would go over their heads. My disciplined dad expected total silence and undivided attention. But getting everybody quiet could take up half the evening. I could sense his exasperation. Here he was in the penultimate part of the story, the build-up to the terrifying finish — the battle scene where the enemy’s artillery shell lands on his vehicle he had got out of, a minute ago. But even before he finishes, the restless audience breaks up randomly, as though artillery shells had landed in their middle, in slow motion. And as dad grew old, he forgot the number of times he narrated the same story to the same audience. Later on, as he got older, in his increasingly recurring senior moments, he forgot what he had started out to say.