The Con Queen of Hollywood by Scott C. Johnson

Author:Scott C. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Stories unravel. They fray and tear, and the lives they hold come unglued. But new stories always emerge to replace them. Since her time on the debate circuit in Southern California, Harvey’s former tutor Amber Wormington had married and was living in Hastings, Nebraska. Four years passed. One day in 2003, her husband told her that someone “really weird” had repeatedly called her, a woman named Alison Fisher, who she had since learned was Harvey’s friend from Bradley, the one he had pushed down the stairs. When the phone next rang, Amber answered. “Hargobind,” she said, using the given name of which he had been so ashamed, “why are you pretending to be Alison Fisher?” There was no answer and then the line went dead. Shortly after, “Alison Fisher” started calling Amber’s sister. For months, the phone rang every day at 11 a.m. The calls were so regularly timed, and so consistent, that there could be only one explanation, the sisters concluded. Harvey must be living in some sort of an institution, permitted to call the most important people in his life only at a certain hour.

At this point, Amber still thought of Harvey as a “little broken baby bird.” With time, however, the story of his daily intrusion in her sister’s midday routine grew into a different kind of story, a tale to be told at parties to great effect, the “spooky story of Alison Fisher, a true-life ghost story.”

ONE OF THE REASONS THE story the screenwriter Gregory Mandarano had been sold was so convincing was that it was embedded within a long tradition of other stories. And not just any stories, but the centuries-old origin stories that undergirded much of Indonesia’s history. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, for instance, were two of Hinduism’s foundational, epic Sanskrit texts. Written by the Indian poet Valmiki somewhere between the fifth and first centuries BCE, the Ramayana tells the story of the fourteen-year journey of a stately prince, Rama, who, having been banished from the Kosala Kingdom by his father and stepmother, travels the forests for years before embarking on a heroic return to claim the throne. Composed of some 24,000 verses, it is one of the longest poems in world literature, alongside other sagas like The Odyssey and The Tale of Genji. The story is set in what is now Uttar Pradesh, where the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers join in northern India. As Hinduism grew over the centuries, extending its reach eastward, the poems wound their way into the fabric of other East Asian societies, including Indonesia’s, evolving but also cleaving along the way.

Perhaps because Indonesia is a fragmented land of several thousand islands, the mythology morphed repeatedly. On the island of Java, another version of the Ramayana story took shape. It was called the Kakawin Ramayana and recounted the tale of a massacre by Ravana, a demonic Hindu deity. This Javanese story also incorporated much of the island’s preexisting mythology, including the powerful Javanese demigod Semar, a punokawan, or

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.