How every deformity demands a story

There are stories, which a slightly bent little finger, or a scar below a person’s eyes can tell. Some helps you create a child hood story, of that person who exhibits such distinct marks, which excites your imagination while some end up being plain simple marks of memory.

When a person with a bent little finger comes in to the room, you cannot straight away ask how he got that because:
a. That would be stupid and
b. Very stupid.
So you wait. You wait for him to be enough acquainted that then you can slide in your curiosity without looking stupid. But in that gap of oblivion that you are in, you tend to fill in stories that you create on your own; with absolutely no input from the person involved or any signs of conformity that it is true.

When I see a person with a bent little finger, entering in the conference room to give me a presentation, I imagine of the run this guy might have took sometime in his childhood that ended up not very well. The fall he had, and an absolute wrong way of stopping himself with his hands that he might have attempted, which ended up having his little finger between the ground and the still-in-air hand, in an angle that will make even the strongest hearts twitch. What results? Crack! Ouch! and a bone – broken, dislocated, and suddenly rushed to a doctor. Wow what a pain that man went through. God! How would he have endured so much pain as a child. That is when I think of my own little finger. What if my little finger was to have such a bad fate? Ouch! That hurts to even imagine it.
And while the real reason can be anywhere between a natural painless birth-time bent to an escape from a catastrophe that luckily just harmed his little finger only, I have now wasted a good valuable 4 minutes of this man’s presentation, living a story on how his finger was ‘probably’ bent.

What did I gain from that? Nothing. But somehow this man has now got some hero attributes – those of endurance, courage – which makes me have some respect for him. Why am I so obsessed with this man with the bent little finger? Because he is for real and this episode is true.

It is sad I don’t have any great marks to show. I have two good parallel scars on my left hand, but the only first inference people take from that is that I was a psycho who had cut his hand for some girl. The truth lies far away in the midst of “an unfortunate fun game, a wrongly placed piece of metal and a carefree attitude towards the stitches”.
Oh yes then these is this other scar on my face, slightly above my left face cheek. People tend to have really good stories about this in their head like a rough fight, a fall, an adventure going wrong, till the time they ask me what it is – “A wild mosquito bite”.

Its sometimes funny and sometimes terribly misleading how we end up creating stories – if not as fully formed as the ones I have in my head but at least some wild speculations – when you see deformities and anomalies in a person’s physical appearance.

The gaping wait between the birth of an urge to have an explanation to something, and the moment you get the truth – is always a fun ride through your imagination to fill up the gap.