simulacrum of life

he relied on his memory for his jests and on his imagination for his facts. that, in a line sums up thatha's years after sliding into dementia. he had such a straight face and a somber expression when he related to people stories of how he met queen elizabeth ii, and how she called the air force base he was working at and how he stood at attention whilst she spoke to him over the phone. all this was quite believable, until he mentioned how my grandma met the queen and fell at her feet. and that's when eyebrows would rise. but hey.. he's a respectable elder person, so one shouldn't call him a liar, and so people would be a lot more believing of his story than they otherwise might be. until today, i'm not sure if he did invent those stories or if there was some element of truth in them. i'm quite sure that my grandma didn't meet the queen, because she said so herself, but thatha might have, since he was in the RAF when singapore was still a british colony and the queen did visit the country then. thatha did have the makings of a good storyteller. he intertwined truth with fiction until one could not differentiate one from the other.