A strange memorial for a strange man. A hundred years after the Arab revolt against the Turks in 1916-18, a bullet excavated in the Arabian desert by experts in the Great Arab Revolt Project, seems to suggest that T.E. Lawrence, the British military adviser to the Arabs at the time, was probably more truthful in his memoirs than some historians have given him credit for. Found at the site of the Arab attack that became the great train ambush scene in David Lean's biopic, Lawrence of Arabia, the bullet is said to have come from a gun that Lawrence alone used, and not by any of his companions in battle. It seems rather too tiny an object on which to base the truth of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's substantial account of his experience of the events in 1916-18. Some historians have felt that Lawrence, while retailing some facts, tended to tell "whoppers" about his own doings. Yet it was the magnificent, dashing, colourful but enigmatic, canny yet innocent, ultimately betrayed and tragic Lawrence of the Seven Pillars that captured the imagination of readers. The excavated bullet seems to have been waiting all these years to reassure Lawrence's admirers of the authenticity of their hero's account. If this proves, in defiance of the school of sceptical historians, that truth is truly stranger than fiction, then fiction provides a perfectly legitimate route to get at the truth. Either way, Lawrence passes with flying colours.

It is comforting to give in to the pious idea that truth is one and falsehood hydra-headed. But the truth is almost never simple; as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested in a cryptic remark, reality obscures it. Even the reputation Lawrence acquired for embellishment - from well-known experts, no less - was inextricably bound up with the realities of the confusing, half-obscured tangle of British policies towards the Arabs. Far more dependable, probably, is the mysterious artist within, who selects memories and arranges them according to a secret design that Rabindranath Tagore found to be the truth in the memories of his life. There can be no sense of truth without this inner artist, the artist with the secret design. That artist has the freedom to forge the path of truth beyond what 'really' happened: "...it's the truth, even if it didn't happen," claimed Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, where deception becomes one of the main weapons for the freedom of the human spirit from fierce psychological control.

Lawrence - and a solitary excavated bullet - have shown that what is written can actually be true. And that there can be no way to fix a relationship between history and memory, reality and fiction. These go rough and tumble in the hay in the most improper way. Did anyone dare disbelieve Jonah? Yet, says Gabriel García Márquez, "Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."