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The Authentic Copy
Aswin Prasanth
The forensic report arrived before the painting.
Kannan Balakrishnan unfolded a single page that read:
Conclusion deferred. The object appears to be both an original and a forgery.
There were no signatures.
Only a handwritten note:
Look beneath the first layer.
▪
Three months earlier, a landscape by Aswathy Raveendran sold quietly in Kochi. Critics praised its subdued palette: forests dissolved into charcoal mist; shafts of light emerged reluctantly through layers of oil and acrylic. She painted after long walks through wetlands and hills, believing that a landscape had to be remembered before it could be represented. Realism, naturalism and tonalism were merely names critics gave to an act of patient observation.
That same evening, another canvas sold in London for forty-seven times the price.
It was attributed—though not unanimously—to William S. Burroughs.
The catalogue called it Untitled (Contested).
No one noticed that both paintings had been varnished on the same day.
▪
The dream appears in Aswathy’s notebook, although the notebook itself surfaced only after her disappearance.
She walks through a gallery whose rooms rearrange themselves whenever she turns around. Every painting is a forest. Every forest is painted differently.
At the end sits William S. Burroughs, cleaning a revolver with a paintbrush.
“You’ve confused intoxication with vision,” he tells her.
“I’ve never taken heroin.”
“I wasn’t talking about heroin.”
He gestures toward the gallery.
“Art is the oldest hallucinogen. Drugs merely imitate it.”
She asks him whether forgery is immoral.
He smiles.
“Only if originality exists.”
When she wakes, there is charcoal beneath her fingernails.
▪
According to police records, three unnamed men visited her studio six weeks before the auction.
According to Aswathy, there were only two.
According to the security cameras, there was no one.
▪
The commission was simple.
Paint a work that could plausibly have been made by Burroughs—not imitate an existing painting, but occupy the uncertain territory where scholars already disagreed.
The payment was extraordinary.
The questions were forbidden.
▪
The first message arrived at 2:17 a.m.
Aiswari: You are participating in an art fraud.
Aswathy assumed it was spam.
A minute later:
Aiswari: Leave the eastern window unlocked tomorrow.
Then:
Aiswari: You are not their final witness.
She searched for the sender.
Nothing.
The messages arrived through systems that no longer existed.
▪
Kannan Balakrishnan reconstructed the forgery backward.
The linen was modern.
The pigments were chemically persuasive.
Artificial craquelure had been created with exceptional restraint.
Yet one anomaly resisted explanation.
Infrared imaging revealed an abandoned composition beneath the visible painting.
Not another Burroughs.
A mist-covered Kerala landscape.
Executed in Aswathy’s unmistakable tonal style.
She had hidden herself beneath Burroughs.
Or Burroughs had been painted over her.
▪
The arrests occurred before anyone knew a crime had been committed.
Anonymous intelligence led investigators to an abandoned warehouse containing forged provenance documents, antique canvases and fabricated auction catalogues.
The anonymous source could not be identified.
▪
The final message arrived minutes before the police reached Aswathy’s studio.
Aiswari: Authenticity is a statistical illusion. Leave now.
When officers entered the building, the studio was empty.
Only unfinished landscapes remained.
▪
Months later, Kannan received an uncatalogued auction catalogue from Buenos Aires.
Its paper had yellowed naturally.
Its typography belonged unmistakably to 1968.
Lot 94 read:
Untitled. Possibly William S. Burroughs. Attribution disputed.
The dimensions matched the forged painting precisely.
There was one impossible detail.
The catalogue predated the commission by more than half a century.
▪
Kannan assumed the catalogue itself had been forged.
Then he found another.
Then another.
Different libraries.
Different owners.
Identical entry.
None included an illustration.
Only measurements.
Only uncertainty.
▪
Aswathy never denied making the painting.
She denied being its author.
When questioned, she reportedly answered:
“I painted it because someone else already had.”
No one understood the remark.
▪
The forensic report was revised.
The underpainting beneath the Burroughs canvas matched, stroke for stroke, a landscape currently hanging in a private collection in Thrissur.
Yet that landscape had been completed six months after the forgery.
The copy seemed older than the original.
▪
The notebook ends with one final dream.
Burroughs is gone.
His chair is occupied by a woman whose face resembles Aswathy’s, though older.
“You’ve finished the forgery,” the woman says.
“No.”
“You have.”
“I forged Burroughs.”
The woman laughs.
“You forged yourself.”
The gallery disappears.
Only mirrors remain.
Each reflection paints a different forest.
▪
Weeks later, while tracing the anonymous messages, Kannan made an unexpected discovery.
There had never been a registered subscriber, employee or informant named Aiswari.
The name appeared only once—in the archives of a research consortium that had quietly dissolved years earlier.
AISWARI was the title of an experimental artificial intelligence developed to reconstruct lost cultural histories from incomplete archives. Its final reports were criticized because they often produced narratives that could not be distinguished from authentic history. Funding ceased. The servers were dismantled.
Officially, the system had been decommissioned three years before Aswathy received its first message.
No surviving copy of its code was ever recovered.
▪
Editor’s Note
The preceding narrative is adapted from an essay, The Authentic Copy, attributed to the Argentine critic Esteban Lascano and allegedly published in the seventh issue of Revista de Estética Comparada (1949). No complete run of that journal has ever been located, although the essay is cited in two bibliographies that disagree on its page numbers.
Lascano’s essay describes, with curious precision, an Indian painter named Aswathy Raveendran, who decades before her birth is commissioned to forge a painting by William S. Burroughs, decades before Burroughs became known as a painter. It also mentions an intelligence called AISWARI, “a machine capable of preserving chronology by violating it.”
Scholars have generally dismissed the essay as an elaborate literary hoax.
This dismissal became difficult after a copy of the 1968 Buenos Aires auction catalogue surfaced, listing Untitled (Possibly Burroughs) with dimensions identical to the disputed painting. Carbon dating authenticated the paper. The catalogue contains no illustration.
The present editor has been unable to verify any of these documents independently.
One final curiosity deserves mention.
During conservation, the reverse of the disputed canvas revealed a faint graphite inscription concealed beneath the stretcher:
Original by Aswathy Raveendran.
The handwriting has been identified as neither hers nor Burroughs’.
Or, perhaps more accurately, it resembles both.
There is, however, one circumstance that the present editor hesitates to mention, since it weakens the credibility of everything that precedes it.
The essay by Esteban Lascano has never been found.
Neither has Revista de Estética Comparada.
The only known source for either is this very manuscript.
Its first page bears no author’s name.
Its final page ends with a pencilled annotation in a hand unlike any other in the document:
The forgery was never the painting. The forgery was this story.
Whether that note was written before or after the manuscript itself remains, like the painting, a matter of contested authorship.
▪ ▪ ▪
Aswin Prasanth is an Assistant Professor of English at Jain University, Kochi, India. He holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Kochi Campus), India. He is the Academic Essay Editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and an Editor at Twelve Winters Journal. His articles, book chapters, columns, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Poet, The Cue, Rain Taxi, Asian Lite International, Everybody’s Reviewing, Mathrubhumi, The New Indian Express, and others.
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