““I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.””

In this quote, Saleem is defending his version of events to Padma at the end of Book Two. What really stood out to me with this quote, is not the wording or the defense, but rather the utter truth of it. Every truth is subjective to the person saying it. It can be twisted, it can be transformed, yet it still remains the truth, because every memory is biased and each person sees the world, remembers the world in different forms of truth.

If a soldier is killed in war, who do you blame? Their comrades? The man who drafted him? Or the man that started and continued the war? Each of these may or may not have played a certain type of role that could lead to the soldier’s death. Each of them is a truth that could be used to blame the death of the soldier on them.

A man could blame himself for killing a person, but when asked what he did, he could simply say that it was his idea to use a certain tactic that relied on a back-up that he was sure would work, but, in fact, failed, thus resulting in the soldier being killed. Do you blame the man with the plan or the back-up that refused to show for the soldier’s death?

The truth of the quote is that memory modifies what we remember, painting a villain, a hero, a bystander in negative or positive lights depending on emotions and your own view of the events.