The Best Garden

The childhood fairy tale of the beauty and the beast where the two are mutually exclusive attributes is not quite suited for our real lives. Instead one comes across situations where the most beautiful coexists with the beastly, the most delicate springs out of the undesirable, the finest and the most precious results from the stench of the ugly and the rotten. In a twist to the age-old fairy tale we have in this story ‘The Best Garden’ beauty which is to be found in heavenly gardens with rows of the most amazingly attractive flowers whereas the beast is metaphorically present in the form of the highly undesirable and unwelcome lies which pervade human interactions. Having deleterious consequences, breaking confidence and trust, exposing one’s vulnerabilities and shattering goodwill and hope for the life that lies ahead, untruths are the severest form of the ugly that one can come across. They are the most certain way in which the best forms of beauty are rendered poisonous and not worthy of a second look, upsetting the usual binary between the beautiful and the ugly.