Curating the Narrative

Vishwanan had a stable job, a matching designation, and a wife named Neela, who was sharp enough to see through his curated charm and done pretending otherwise. Their daughter, Kartika, now in her twenties, lived away from home and visited only when necessary. Quiet and observant, her eyes followed her parents; her mind judged them.

He lived in a gated society apartment, where he made an art of appearing grounded. Sunday mornings were his performance hour: back from his run, picking up fruits, vegetables, and the ironing along the way, a neatly folded newspaper tucked under his arm.

He spoke of Neela in amused sighs and anguished tones. Her “obsessive pill-popping,” her “snack habits,” her “disregard for his views and guidance.”

Vishwanan didn’t argue anymore. He watched Neela with the quiet disdain of a man who believed he deserved someone more… pliable. He looked past her in conversations, listened only to interrupt, and dismissed her sharpness as unnecessary noise. He offered her nothing but condescension, disguised as composed courtesy. Aways polite, never kind.

He laughed silently at her slow walk and her aches and pains. Shook his head when she bent to pick something up. Raised an eyebrow each time she reached for a snack. Then laced up his running shoes and jogged around the society lanes. He never said it, but he didn’t need to: he was fitter, faster, better.

His cruelty was never loud. He weaponized gentleness, made it cut cleaner than rage ever could.

He mentioned Kartika with fatherly affection, but always with qualifiers.
“She only calls when she wants something,” he’d say, chuckling softly.
“My phone rings when she needs a new phone. Or shoes.”
“She’s very sensitive though,” he would add, pretending to care, while disregarding what it would do to her if she ever discovered his chosen indulgences.

He took pride in saying he “let them be.” But it wasn’t grace—it was neglect dressed as virtue. Kartika’s boundaries felt inconvenient. Her distance, insulting. Her autonomy bruised the part of him that still believed women owed him emotional loyalty.

When relatives and friends came over, he became the invisible husband and parent. A sigh, a smile, and suddenly, the quiet victim of female indifference.

He boasted about 28 years of marriage, joking that Neela was his bitter, sorry, better half. As if endurance without integrity meant anything. His marriage was never a commitment. It was a costume. One he wore to silence suspicion, to sanctify selfishness. It gave him the freedom to stray, and the credibility to lie.

He told himself he was misunderstood. That Neela never truly got him. So he strayed out of soul hunger.

He wrote often. Not stories, not reflections. Scripts. Carefully worded captions for his social media handles, where he posed as the weary philosopher, the gentle husband, the misunderstood father. A photo of his morning chai, captioned “Peace is brewed, not found.” 

His journal was no different. Leather-bound, pages uncreased. He filled it with lines that sounded profound when read aloud.
“Forgiveness is freedom.”
“I choose silence over chaos.”
“Stay in the moment.”
He never wrote about the things he did. Only about how he wanted to be seen.

He called it healing. But it was rehearsing.

Even his apologies were curated, dropped into conversations like polished pebbles, smooth, small, and easy to overlook. “I’m not perfect, the years have hardened me,” he’d say, eyes lowered just enough. “I’ve made mistakes,” he’d whisper, never naming them.

He didn’t write to understand himself. He wrote to be admired. To be mourned without ever having earned grief.

He copied people. Not their words, exactly, but their essence.

A colleague once spoke about mindfulness, and by evening, Vishwanan had posted a quote about “being present.” Neela once mentioned a book she loved, and he added it to his shelf, never read it, just displayed it. Kartika once said, “I need space,” and he repeated it weeks later in a conversation, as if he’d coined it.

He collected personalities like souvenirs. Borrowed philosophies. Mimicked empathy.

Even his brother wasn’t spared. His brother blogged, so Vishwanan started blogging as well. His brother ran every morning, so Vishwanan bought new shoes and joined a running group, not out of joy or discipline, but out of quiet competition. He didn’t want to connect. He tried to match. To mirror. To outperform.

He didn’t absorb anything. He adopted it. Just long enough to seem evolved. Just deep enough to be admired.

To the world, he was a good man. A patient man. A quiet man. But that was just the most successful role he’d ever been curating.

Vishwanan never raised his voice. He didn’t need to. He simply lowered his volume and let the world fill in the blanks.

But he wasn’t lonely. He was busy. Busy curating his image with clinical precision. He never paused to think that the women he sought out were daughters, too, much like Kartika was his.

He wasn’t seeking connection. He was curating perception. A filtered life where he looked calm, wise, and quietly wronged, a soft stream of sob stories, laced with just enough wit to seem harmless.

He needed attention, not responsibility. Adoration, not accountability. Intimacy, not the loyalty it demanded. He wanted to be pursued, praised, and pedestalized while giving nothing in return.

And when cracks appeared, he simply tweaked his morals inside his head. Justified his actions with selective truths. Offered himself the forgiveness he refused to extend to others.

He didn’t crave love. He craved devotion, the unearned kind.

He said he was lonely. Whispered it like a well-timed confession. Dropped it into conversations as if it were an affliction that had happened to him.

But loneliness hadn’t crept up on him. It was summoned. By every truth he swallowed. Every boundary he crossed. Every part of himself he betrayed, for approval, lust, or control.

He forgot that he had abandoned himself long before anyone else did, abandoned his truth. Abandoned his conscience. Abandoned the man he once pretended he wanted to be.

He wasn’t lonely. He was hollow.

Eventually, someone did see through him.
Not through his charm. Not through his smooth talk. But through the quiet curating of his suffering. Through the emotional edits. Through the perfectly placed pauses and sighs.

She didn’t stay. She didn’t explain. She simply stopped playing the part he had written for her.

He doesn’t write anymore. Not for the world, at least.

But in his head, the edits never stopped. He’s still curating the narrative, one in which he meant well. Still revising the story to fit his script of soft-spoken suffering and still imagining a version where he was the one who was left, unfairly.

He tells himself things like “Whatever has to happen will happen,” as if surrender were wisdom, as if passivity were peace.

He repeats lines from his old journal, “I choose silence over chaos.” “Some people leave, and that’s their journey.” He says them like mantras, but they’re exit lines. Well-rehearsed, well-timed, and empty.

Sometimes, late at night, he catches his reflection in the mirror. Not the softened version he showed the world. But the raw one. The one that looks back without reverence or rescue.

And in those moments, even the mirror doesn’t flinch. It has no empathy left. Just quiet accuracy.

There he is.
An aging man, clinging to borrowed philosophies. Haunted by truths he never dared to live. The kind of man who called himself spiritual while ghosting his soul.

He is lonely because he has no one left to deceive. Not even himself.

This blog post is part of ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla in collaboration with Mads’ Cookhouse.

This post is written for the Blogaberry Creative Challenge – August 2025  Prompt: Any word ending in “-ing”: Chosen word: Curating