A writer of novels, essays, children’s fiction, and travelogues, Paul Zacharia is known for his surrealistic and chimeric narratives that teleport readers to a world with its own unique laws. Zacharia has written over 50 works in Malayalam, known for blending mystery and ambiguity. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and has also received the Kendra Sahitya Akademi and Kerala Sahitya Akademi awards. True Story of a Writer, A Philosopher And a Shape-shifter, is a revised edition of Zacharia’s debut novel in English, The Secret History of Compassion, published in 2019, in which he portrays reality as contentious by inverting and skewing traditional structures such as husband/wife, truth/lie, and life/death. In True Story of a Writer, A Philosopher And a Shape-shifter, Paul Zacharia weaves humour, magic, and ambiguity to create a world where hunger is old-fashioned, air is copyrighted, and the moral market is saturated. The logical fallacies that govern the Writer, Philosopher, and Shape-Shifter make their story a “true story”. What is the weight of desire? Shifting from fiction to nonfiction was a herculean task for Lord Spider, a celebrity writer, and master of grandiose fiction, with a copious oeuvre of over a hundred and thirty books. He is a writer so deeply committed to his art that it has seeped into his language, his logic of the world, and even his relationships. The pertinent question with which Zacharia introduces the readers to Lord Spider’s dilemma is this: How will Lord Spider, who has only written fiction in his long career, write an 800-word essay on Compassion? For someone whose reality is superimposed by the logic of stories, fiction, and myth-making, and questions like, “What is the weight of desire?” occupy the mind, writing non-fiction means abandoning comfort and habit to enter a completely strange realm. Just as one day Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children discovers that his nose makes telepathy possible, Lord Spider senses a weird presence in his room. That’s when a crow lands in his room, and introduces himself as an ardent admirer of his works. A shape-shifter by nature and a hangman by profession, Mr JL Pillai is keen to learn from the master of grandiose fiction. A strange collaboration develops between Mr Pillai and Lord Spider, a parasitic relationship where Spider is dependent on Pillai to assist in completing the essay. Pillai is ever obsequious, worships Spider and his philosopher wife, Rosi. He is always either falling at their feet celebrating his sheer brilliance or talking about how he saved a baby bat who later taught him the art of shape-shifting. Like the Yepanchin family is raptured by Prince Myshkin’s stories in Fyodor Doestovoeky’s The Idiot, Rosi is equally awestruck by Pillai’s acumen and recommendations. Zacharia’s characters come with opposing and utterly different worldviews, but partnerships and collaborations bring them together to work for a common goal. Their worldviews are different not in terms of class, caste, or gender. In a discussion on shape-shifting and desire, Pillai claims that the weight of human desire makes flying difficult, to which Spider asks the most tangential questions, “If you say desire makes fliers heavy, what about all those people in airplanes?” he goes on to postulate, “Is it possible, then, that some planes crash because of the insufferable weight of those desires?” With such questions, Zacharia brings into question whether there is a strict line between fiction and non-fiction, is there even a distinction between the two and do they not keep flowing into each other seamlessly? The world is in silos only in the trio’s imagination, because their languages merge fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies, life and death, however they may try to separate them. Of anti-nationals and democracy Zacharia makes it evident in the novel that fantastical narratives are not free from political paraphernalia. There is a world outside which suspects, watches, and monitors from the panopticon. Rosi, who is a “mirthless philosopher” and wife of Lord Spider, is suspicious of shape-shifting and worries whether it is not an anti-national activity. There is also an element of appeasing and boot-licking while writing the essay, and tailor it according to the needs of the Communist Party. Zacharia has made sure to address the pain points of Indian democracy, suggesting there is more than what meets the eye. The structure of the novel becomes inconspicuous to the reader as they understand that Zacharia’s story will end when Lord Spider’s essay on Compassion ends. The essay on Compassion is a “product” of the novel, a work which emerged from the frenzied collaboration between a writer, a philosopher, and a shape-shifter. It is a world of lies. But a lie is not a lie since it exists, after all. It is difficult to decipher the deductive logic of Paul’s work, but the reader is made comfortable in the uneasy atmosphere through the thread of storytelling. The novel is always on the precipice of saturating readers – but Zacharia saves it every time. True Story of a Writer, a Philosopher, and a Shape-Shifter: A Novel, Paul Zacharia, Penguin India.