The Five Dollar Smile

by Shashi Tharoor

  “Bobby, dear,” Myra said, “this is Flight Lieutenant Rahim Ali, of the IAF. He’s my other guest for the weekend.” This, Bobby says, was accompanied by her most charming of smiles, but in his present frame of mind, he wasn’t even able to appreciate that without wondering whether it was directed at him or at his aviator rival. To think that of all the things the fellow could have been—an unemployed engineer (there were a million of them), an Opposition politician or a long-distance runner with athlete’s foot—he had to be an air force man. Musing bitterly over his fate, Bobby gave a sickly grin and handed over the box of chocolates he had hoped he and Myra would nibble over the Sunday. And she spoiled it all by offering Ali the first piece, which the blighter accepted with the most cocksure of thank-yous Bobby has ever heard, or so he says. It was distinctly revolting.

  “Rahim, dear,” Myra said, “do show Bobby where he can leave his things.”

  “Sure, Myra,” Ali replied, still savoring his chocolate. “Follow me,” he added to Bobby, as though addressing one of his bally mechanics, and strode with a familiar step to the stairs. As Bobby followed, Myra gave him a smile, which to his unappreciative eye seemed devoid of all the sweetness and light that had characterized it earlier. He returned a weaker grin than before and followed the rapidly ascending Ali posterior up the stairs.

  Ali waved him to his room, waited for him to dump his stuff on the bed, and then said in a confidential undertone: “And if I were you, I’d take off all that effeminate stuff you’re wearing. What are you—a man or a fop?” And without waiting for a reply from the speechless Bobby, he strode off with a jaunty step.

  As Bobby descended the stairs to join Ali and Myra, he tells me, he was feeling as insecure as a nude at a stag party. That Ali was no mean rival, he was well aware. The blasted pilot was the biggest obstacle on his romantic path, but despite all the fellow’s advantages Bobby was determined to overcome. He had come, he had seen; he’d be damned if he’d go away having conked out.

  Thus braced for an uphill struggle, and consoling himself with the thought that surely a sweet girl like Myra would prefer a polite, well-mannered bloke (him) to an uncouth ruffian of Ali’s genre, Bobby descended the stairs with a brave, if heavy, heart.

  And then he stopped with a jolt. (Here Cedric called for his fourth and sipped it a little ruminatively before proceeding.)

  The reason for Bobby’s abrupt halt (Cedric said) was the fact that he had heard something, in Myra’s voice, emanating from the sitting room, which took him aback rather. He had barely begun to believe his ears when he heard it again.

  “Darling,”—it was unmistakably Myra—“I so admire strong men like you. You’re so—so . . . masculine, darling; not like some other men I know.”

  To Bobby, in the light of what Ali had just advised him, the sentence seemed fraught with innuendo. Who else could the last part refer to but him? Broken, he stumbled back up the stairs. It was not until he had sat heavily on his bed that he began to ponder on his next course of action.

  There was a stage in his thinking, Bobby tells me, when he even contemplated saying that he had just received an urgent telegram calling him back to town, or that he had forgotten something terribly important back in Calcutta that would necessitate a speedy return.

  But the thought of Myra gave him renewed strength. This is not the stuff admen are made of, he told himself. Casting aside his pusillanimity and his woven-silk tie, he arose from his bed, fresh and determined. He would change his colors, too; don faded jeans with a patch in an awkward spot, pull on a bedraggled T-shirt and speak out of the corner of his mouth like Humphrey Bogart, not forgetting to drawl like John Wayne or smile enigmatically like Marlon Brando. That would bring him back into the he-man sweepstakes with a vengeance.

  If he had only paused at the foot of the stairs before stumbling his way back up (Cedric said), Bobby would have been spared the agony of un-natting himself from his treasured Burlington suit-and-tie. For Myra—and I have this from her, myself—had only been rehearsing her lines in her next commercial, saying them aloud while Ali had gone to the WC so as to fix them in her memory. The dialogue, she told me when I rushed to her for an explanation, had run something like this:

  FEMALE MODEL: “Darling, I so admire strong men like you. You’re so—so . . . masculine, darling; not like some other men I know.”

  MALE MODEL: “It’s nice of you to say so, my sweet. And I owe it all to Horlicks.”

  You know the type. And think—if Bobby had walked in, he’d have found Myra repeating the very same lines aloud to the empty air, and she’d have explained the whole thing to him and he’d have dismissed his fears with a laugh. But instead, Bobby stumbled up the stairs, a broken, dejected man. That’s Fate.

  When Bobby reached the sitting room in his new attire Ali had returned—not that Bobby had known that he’d ever been gone, of course. The cool pilot surveyed Bobby as though he were a defective altimeter or something and then remarked, “So I see you’ve changed.”

  “Bobby, dear, why did you get rid of those perfectly charming clothes?” Myra asked, and her tone, to Bobby, seemed bloody sarcastic, and he winced. He was not to know, of course, that Myra much preferred his style of dressing to Ali’s. His change had been on the basis of her overheard utterance, and that, as the tragedy kings of print always say, was his undoing.

  “Aw, thought I’d change into something more pleasant,” Bobby said, out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Beg your pardon, Bobby?”

  “I thought I’d change into something more pleasant,” Bobby repeated, finding some difficulty in lateral articulation.

  “Poor Bobby—do you have a blister in your mouth, dear? I just can’t seem to understand what you’re saying.”

  “I thought I’d change into something more pleasant,” Bobby yelled, his tongue getting almost inextricably tangled up with his molars, causing him to utter an involuntary “ouch” towards the end of his sentence.

  “Oh dear, it is bad,” Myra clucked sympathetically. “Rahim, do you think you have something for a blister?”

  “I do not have a blister, Myra,” Bobby said, trying to keep his voice down while drawling in the manner of John W. He had given up the Humphrey bogey.

  “Then whatever’s the matter with your articulation?” Myra asked irritably. “You used to be able to speak sentences in the past without sounding like a hydrophobic canine with throat cancer.”

  What made it worse, Bobby tells me, was the sight of the bloodhound Ali, sitting back and enjoying his discomfiture. It raised his hackles, causing him to commit excesses which under more normal circumstances he would have shrunk from thinking about.

  He drew himself to his fullest height, which was a handsome five-foot-eight-and-a-half, and looked down at Myra with a steely glint in his eye, picked up from Clint Eastwood in one of his spaghetti Westerns. “I would kindly request you to refrain from making adverse remarks about my articulation, madame,” he said, “when you at your best give the impression of a frog with laryngitis.” It was pretty strong stuff for one who had all but plighted his troth, and Myra, a woman of spirit, rose to her feet with blazing eyes.

  “If that is your attitude,” she said, and there was a Wilkinson sword-edge to her voice, “I would pray trouble you not to pollute this house further with your undesirable presence.”

  Bobby gave her a strained Calmpose smile. “Very well,” he said, “I shall leave now.” He was damned if he was going to continue pressing his suit with a woman who was sarcastic, full of insinuations, insulting, and had other preferences anyway. It was with a truly majestic stride, Bobby tells me, that he walked up the stairs to collect his things.

  Waiter, another John Collins, if you please.

  But after he had hailed the first passing taxi and directed the turbaned charioteer to his Calcutta residence (said Cedric, sipping his fifth) remorse overwhelmed him. He thought of what he had given up because of his foolish pride. So what if a woman was sarcastic, full of i
nsinuations, insulting, and had other preferences anyway, as long as she had what it takes? A minor contender like Rahim Ali could easily have been overcome. Instead he had behaved insufferably—insufferably.

  He did not tarry long at his residence. After dumping his bags there Bobby Chatterjee shot like an arrow straight in the direction of the Light Horse Bar, there to drown his sorrows in alcohol. It was sad, very sad—but it was Fate.

  While Cedric paused to wipe his eyes at the conclusion of his narrative, I perceived that Bobby had finished his drinking bout and risen to his feet. I thought I might as well toddle along and commiserate. Accordingly, I left the others at the table, and strolled to Bobby.

  “I say, Bobby,” I said.

  “What?” His voice, for one who had been steeped in such sorrow, was surprisingly steady.

  “I came to say I heard about Myra, and I want to tell you I’m very sorry. . . .”

  “What the devil are you talking about?”

  “Myra . . .”

  “And who the hell is Myra?”

  At first I thought drink had dulled his memory, and then a sneaking suspicion crept into my mind. I turned to look for Cedric: he had just finished his fifth John Collins, at my expense, and was sidling to the door.

  “You mean you don’t know a girl called Myra?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then what was your drinking session in aid of?” Cedric had left the barroom, and the swing door shut soundlessly after him.

  “Oh, that . . .” Bobby paused in recollection of his miseries—“I placed a thousand bucks on a hot tip—Happy Boy in the 2:30— and it came seventh. Seventh,” he repeated dully. “In a seven-horse race.”

  He walked unhappily to the door through which Cedric had just passed.

  1972

  VILLAGE GIRL, CITY GIRL: A DUET

  The Village Girl

  Sunder had never met a girl like her before. He knew the species existed, of course. At Delhi University the term for its members was behenjis (respected sisters), an ironic reference to the fact that no one in his right mind would try to flirt with one. They wore floral-patterned salwar-kameez with nylon dupattas and scarlet polish was forever flaking off their nails. They also chattered on buses in Hindi or Punjabi and spoke English, if at all, in an accent you could have ground dal with. Here in Kerala you had to allow for regional variations of dress and patois, but Sunder could spot a behenji at fifty paces, and though the word didn’t exist locally in Malayalam, it was clear that a behenji was what she was. And, horror of horrors, he was going to be introduced to her.

  He stood at the foot of the stairs looking into the long hall that served as salon, dining-room, clothes-drying area, and thoroughfare in the ancestral home, and cursed his lack of alternatives. It was bad enough having nothing to do, which was his usual condition on these annual duty-visits to Kerala. It was decidedly worse having to do something he didn’t want to do. His mother had summoned him downstairs to “meet someone your own age.” Knowing his mother, this could easily turn out to be a precocious fourteen-year-old schoolboy who wanted to talk about his stamp collection. Sunder peered around the doorway. The girl sitting with her hands on her lap, next to a white-haired matron of formidable aspect, looked closer to his real age than to his mother’s usual estimation of it, but she was certifiably a behenji. Making conversation with her was going to be even less stimulating than rereading the dog-eared Conan Doyles he had found in his grandfather’s cupboard.

  Sunder swore under his breath, but realized there was no escape. He would have to put in an appearance, for politeness’ sake. But he would be damned if it was going to be more than a perfunctory one, whatever his mother might say in that reproachful way of hers afterward. “Look, I never wanted to come anyway,” he would remonstrate again if she did so. “As far as I’m concerned, this flight to the south every winter is strictly for the birds.” She wouldn’t get the joke, but there would be no mistaking his message. And they would subside again into the mutually resentful truce that always characterized their relations on these visits.

  Every year, without exception, his parents dragged him all the way down to their village homes in Kerala for what they described as a family holiday. This consisted largely of the elders talking interminably to each other about the misfortunes of people Sunder didn’t know, or receiving and paying ritual visits to people Sunder didn’t want to know. As his adolescence advanced Sunder tried to opt out of the exercise and was firmly told he didn’t have an option. “We have to go home,” his father explained, “to renew our roots. I may be working in Delhi, but this is where we’re from and where we all belong.” Sunder bitterly asked once why, if they wanted to renew their roots, he had to be uprooted. His father gave him a shocked lecture on the dangers of cultural deracination. “When you’re our age,” he added, “you’ll be grateful we preserved your identity.” Sunder’s more pertinent arguments—that “home” for him had always been Delhi, where he had grown up, not Kerala, where they had—were overruled without discussion. And so he had to leave his friends and records and motorcycle behind in Delhi to vegetate with his grandparents in Kerala, eat palate-numbing quantities of coconut chutney and attempt to respond in his insufficient Malayalam to predictable gibes about the length of his hair. It was altogether unbearable.

  Today Sunder’s father was out tramping the countryside in a spotless, cream mundu, a pair of thick-soled Bata sandals his only concession to urbanity, catching up on old classmates, while his mother remained “at home” to a miscellaneous collection of distant relatives and nearby acquaintances. Neither activity had appealed to Sunder. He had lain instead on his string-bed, trying with the help of Sherlock Holmes not to think about what he was missing in Delhi. When his mother’s summons came, Holmes and he had not been entirely successful.

  Curses exhaled, Sunder walked in, making no attempt to conceal his lack of enthusiasm. He felt a stab of perverse satisfaction at his mother’s evident disapproval of his sartorial standards. He was defiantly wearing jeans and a fishnet T-shirt, which his father said made him look like the villain’s sidekick in a bad Hindi movie. (His father had only ever seen one Hindi movie, but it had been enough to provide him with an endless stock of stereotypes). The girl, however, seemed to regard him with a sort of light in her eyes. Sunder noticed this and exaggerated the indifference with which he dropped into a wooden chair and mumbled his hello.

  “Narayani Amma is an old friend of the family, dear,” his mother explained, indicating the matron, who favored him with a cursory glance and continued talking in cascading Malayalam at the top of her not inconsiderable voice. Sunder registered that the oration in progress dealt with the marital misfortunes of a number of good-hearted Kerala ladies who all seemed somehow to be related to each other and to the speaker. What a lot of adult delinquents the community had managed to produce, Sunder thought: every one of the ladies mentioned seemed to have married a bounder, a drunkard, a wife-beater, an unemployable idler or a crook unintelligent enough to have been caught with his hand in the till, with the prize unfortunate being the Kollengode woman whose husband had managed to combine in his person every one of these deficiencies.

  “Susheela is Narayani Amma’s niece,” his mother told him by way of introduction to the behenji when her visitor paused for breath. “Her mother’s sister’s son’s daughter,” she added with the precision she customarily applied to the description of such relationships, as if the extra degree of accuracy would somehow render the encounter more full of meaning for Sunder. He briefly tried to trace the lineage his mother had outlined, gave up, and looked away.

  “She has passed her SSLC in the English medium,” the formidable aunt announced with pride. “Go on, Susheela, say something in English to Kamala edathi.” Sunder’s mother smiled encouragingly, but Susheela only simpered her embarrassment, twisting her hands in her lap. Sunder rolled his eyes toward the transverse beams on the ceiling. It was going to be even worse than he had feared.


  But Narayani Amma was not one to let silences endure. Putting the brief diversion determinedly behind her, she picked up her disquisition where she had left off. Sunder gathered she had now turned the powerful floodlights of her larynx on the dark sins of the younger generation. “You don’t know what things are coming to here,” she declaimed. “Just as bad as Hollywood, I tell you. Why, in Karanad Chandrika chechi’s very street in Chittilamchery, well, in the street just behind hers, a Nair girl committed suicide by drinking pesticide. Seems she had been having an affair with, you won’t believe this, an Ezhava boy, a common farmhand they wouldn’t have allowed into their house. Someone told Chandrika chechi the girl found out she was pregnant, but of course she had to be cremated quickly, so no one will ever know. But why talk of Chittilamchery, things are hardly better in our own backyard. Why, just the other week old Gopan Nair’s daughter—you know Gopan Nair, Kallasheri Madhavan Nair’s sister’s husband, whose brother’s son is working for Travancore Chemicals in Madras—well, Gopan Nair’s daughter told her parents, after they had arranged her wedding and everything, that she was in love—can you believe it, in love?—with a Rauther fellow in her class, a Muslim if you please. Can you imagine? They had to stop sending her to school, of course, and some of the Nair boys got together and gave this Muslim a good beating, and told him it would be worse for him if he ever came near the girl’s house again. Apparently he got some sort of labourer’s job in the Gulf or somewhere and went away. But poor Gopan Nair, that girl of his is still refusing to marry anyone. . . .”