The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  Raghav did not know what to say as this fresh reminder of the magnitude of his guilt struck him.

  “And yet,” the Brahmin’s voice resumed its gentle, priestly tone, “there is no sin so great that the Lord in his goodness cannot forgive. Provided the sinner acknowledges his sin; provided he admits of the nature of his misdeeds, the Lord accepts his pleas for forgiveness, and enjoins upon him a future adherence to the path of virtue. You, my son, have chosen to prostitute your religion to the deity of wealth—to rob your own temple of an idol that will, perchance, be made to cross the seas to form part of the heretic collection of some beef-eating American nonbeliever.” He looked pointedly at Raghav again and the hapless thief trembled in his guilt. “And yet—and yet you are not beyond redemption. For in that moment of prayer, I knew that you were not totally lost to the worship of an alien Mammon. I knew you could be saved.”

  He stopped and placed his gaze upon Raghav, one arm still on his shoulder, eyes penetrating into the inner recesses of Raghav’s dark soul. “You must change your ways, my son. Let not this encounter with the mighty power of the Lord be totally without effect. You are not an irreligious man. You can yet grow in the service of the Lord. Abandon your sinful ways, my son, leave the path of dishonesty and vice and return to the way of righteousness. Leave now—but never again turn to this means of living. And may the Lord go with you.”

  It was a dismissal—an unbelievably warmhearted one.

  Raghav’s eyes widened as he looked up at the Man of God. Here was an example of the magnanimity of the Lord! He was being forgiven, set free, given another chance to relive his life. He would use his freedom now to mend the twisted patterns of his existence. His face lifted, and in his relief, an entire new world of hope and promise opened up before him.

  He looked at the Brahmin with dumb gratitude.

  There was nothing he could say; there was too much to be said. Tears sprang into his eyes as he clasped the priest’s hands and sank to his knees to kiss his benefactor’s feet.

  Then, his tears streaming down his cheeks, he stumbled mutely past the stuffed sack, out of the temple. The Brahmin smiled sagely at his retreating back.

  For a long moment, the criminal’s flashlight still in his hand, the Brahmin stood thus, smiling his wisdom. Idly he allowed the faint beam to splash over the almost overflowing sack on the floor. Then, slowly, deliberately, he sighed. Switching the flashlight off, he padded soundlessly to where the sack lay and picked it up, feeling its weight in his hands. Then, with his smile no longer on his face, he walked to the temple doorway. For a full minute he stood still, his watchful eyes traveling in every direction, his ears pricked for the slightest sound. Then he heaved the sack over his shoulder, cast a last surreptitious look around him for pursuers, and disappeared into the night.

  1971

  The Simple Man

  “Have you ever received a letter from someone who is dead?” the man at the bar asked, of no one in particular.

  A few faces, mildly interested, turned towards him. He had been drinking a great deal; his eyes were bloodshot, his speech slurred, his grip on his glass unsteady. He sat slouched on the tall bar stool, his body crumpled, dependent totally on the bar rail for support.

  “No, never had the mortification,” someone said. “Why—have you?”

  “Yes.” The man did not even look at his questioner, but perhaps that was simply because he was in too advanced a state of inebriation. “I have—today. This evening a letter arrived, postmarked Ludhiana, from my friend Karan Dhillon. Karan was then dead exactly five minutes. Only, he’d been here in Trivandrum for a week.”

  “Oh.” The questioner sounded disappointed, for the explanation did not sound extraordinary at all. He had hoped for an alcoholic tall tale. “Well, what with the rail strike and the way the mails are being delayed, your friend may well have posted the letter before he left for Trivandrum—eight or nine days for a letter is hardly unusual at this time.”

  “Yes,” said the man at the bar dully. “Yes . . . indeed, that’s exactly what did happen.” He still stared ahead, in a world of his own, making no further move to communicate.

  His embryonic audience began to lose interest in him. What had promised to be an intriguing story looked as though it was degenerating into just another dipsomaniac rambling. He had almost been forgotten when another fellow—a young, nervous-looking individual sitting across from him—plucked up his courage and asked:

  “Karan Dhillon? You mean the cricketer?”

  The man tried to locate the new voice, but his eyes couldn’t focus with ease. “I mean the cricketer.”

  “Plays for Punjab?”

  “Played for Punjab.” There was the ghost of a smile, a strangely bitter wisp of amusement at his own punctilious emphasis. Never could tolerate solecisms, even if drunk.

  “Oh, my God.” The cricket fan seemed genuinely upset. His voice sounded hollow, empty, as though the loss had been personal. “He was a friend of yours?”

  “Yes,” the man at the bar said. “Yes, he was a friend of mine . . . the closest friend I’ve ever had.” He seemed to relapse consciously into silence, his mind elsewhere, at an anonymous plot in a cemetery perhaps. The air in the barroom was thick with silence. It was the man himself who broke it, speaking in a strange, distant, almost disembodied voice.

  “We grew up together, walked and played and fought together, worked and studied and holidayed together, loved and lost together, cried and laughed together, learned to face the world together. . . . We went to the same public school in Dehra Dun, graduated from the same college in Delhi . . . and then we parted, me to return to Trivandrum as a Government officer, he to Punjab to continue the family tradition of absentee landlordism . . . but distances never kept us apart. He came and visited me here, four, five, six times, and I’ve lost count of how often I’ve been to Ludhiana at every conceivable opportunity . . . Oh yes, we were friends, Karan and I. Friends—to the death.”

  His voice trailed off into the now familiar silence. No one in the room trusted himself to break it. There was something intensely personal and moving in the man’s loss, and the pathos of his suffering seemed to come from deep inside that dispirited body. Shattered and desolate, he sank his head on to his outstretched arm, ignoring the drink at the end of it. His friend’s death seemed to have affected him far too deeply for a decent man to probe him about it. But it had seemed as though he wanted to talk, to get it out of his system.

  The cricket fan, for one, seemed unwilling to let the matter rest at that. He had idolized Karan Dhillon, though he had never seen him; but he had read so much about the swashbuckling “gentleman cricketer” of Punjab who had captured the imagination of sportscribes with his aggressive and stylish strokeplay, yet had never been looked upon favorably by the national-team selectors. Karan Dhillon, the tempestuous enigma, a man who could produce sixes at will and yet fall so often to incredibly poor shots, a cricketer who, in his element, could bowl out any batting side in the country and yet was often made to look worse than pedestrian. Karan Dhillon who went through all his matches with an expressionless poker face and shunned the photographers who wanted to immortalize it. “What kind of a man was Karan Dhillon?” the cricket fan asked, breathlessly.

  Slowly, almost painfully, the man at the bar stool righted himself, and smiled sardonically again. “A very simple man,” he said at length, “a very simple man indeed. Quite at variance with his public image. Nothing Karan did on the field was really indicative of the stormy, proud nature sportswriters kept foisting on him. Karan played cricket that way because that was the only way he knew how to play it. He revealed no emotion in public, primarily because he didn’t see the need to. You see, Karan Dhillon was a man of very simple likes and dislikes. He did only what he wanted to do and then did it to the best of his ability. He took avidly to any sport because physical activity suited him and he had a keen eye and quick reflexes. Both in school and college he played for the team in four or five games,
captaining both Doon and St. Stephen’s at cricket—no mean feat, I assure you. Naturally—or characteristically—what he was good at became his primary interest as well. He spent almost all his time playing one game or the other, depending on the weather. At his air-conditioned bungalow on the outskirts of Ludhiana he possessed what was probably the only radio this side of the Suez Canal that caught the BBC internal sports broadcasts. That’s how much of a sports fanatic he was.”

  The man paused in his narrative to take a long gulp from his glass before resuming again. “Karan was a very easy person to get along with. All that he was intensely concerned about was sports, especially cricket, an easygoing life, and the well-being of his six-foot-two-inch, two-hundred pound muscular frame. Very simple concerns. Little else upset him. Karan knew no other philosophy, and this one suited him well. There were very few things he did want, and what he wanted he easily got with his family’s money. This meant there was little he was desperate about. It is very difficult to come into conflict with a man like that.”

  The man gulped down the rest of his drink and called for another. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, and his eyes were beginning to bulge. “Karan, however, made few real friends. Despite the fact that as a sports hero he was fairly well-known, he tended to keep out of the mainstream of college life because he didn’t see what he had to gain by ‘smiling and saying hello to every toady who passes me’ as he put it. Because of his singular lack of ambition and his disinclination to exert himself to further his own interests, I found it very easy to get along with him. And I shared some of his interests, such as an amateur penchant for sports criticism, so that made things much easier. He was a very simple man, direct and straightforward, and ours was a very simple relationship—the deep friendship of two men who accepted each other for what we were worth and learned to admire and respect our individual attributes. In a way, I suppose, I tended to dominate the relationship, for I was bright and brilliant and ambitious and extroverted while Karan, who was none of these things, proved only too willing to let me force myself on him. He usually didn’t mind; but when he did he showed it, and when he showed it he usually got his own way.”

  The fresh drink had now arrived, and the man took a long draught. Miraculously, he was still speaking coherently. He must have had a whole vat inside him, thought the cricket fan, and the way his eyes were struggling to maintain clear sight it was evident that his line of vision was as crooked as a chucker’s bowling arm. Pupils bleary, he resumed, doggedly maintaining clarity in both speech and thought process.

  “It was a comfortable relationship, and we both enjoyed it. As I said before, Karan was a very simple man, and it was his very simplicity that marked the keynote of our friendship. Because he kept it on a simple level, it remained all these years, uncomplicated by the tensions that tend to creep in to any alliance of disparate forces.” He took another sip and lost the trend of his conversation. “He would drop in often to my office and pull my leg about my secretary, a buxom, matronly forty-year-old with glasses whom he called ‘7.5’ on account of her lens power. ‘Still busy chasing 7.5 round the desk, eh?’ he would often ask when he met me. I mean, that was the kind of chap he was—even his humor stayed on that simple, earthy plane.

  “I called him ‘Punjabi’—really, that was the most egregious thing about him, his Punjabiness, and he retaliated with a lot of ‘Southey’ jokes of dubious taste and quality. But our ribbing of each other was always good-natured, the ethnic conflict could scarcely exist with our cosmopolitan backgrounds and the ‘Punjabi’ and the ‘Southey’ remained simple jokes that were an integral part of our very simple relationship. . . .” The man reached into an inside-pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This will show you what I mean—his last letter: the one which arrived today. . . .”

  He held it out; the cricket fan took it from him eagerly, and a couple of necks craned over his shoulder as the young fellow read it out in a quavering voice.

  Hey P.M.:—Too busy running after 7.5 to drop me a line as promised? Or maybe it’s the Ludhiana postal service, but anyway do write soon and confirm, since I’ve got to make my booking well in advance (waiting for two weeks at Indian Airlines). Looking forward to seeing you in Southieland again. . . . Did you see the Davis Cup? It seemed that the quantity of games rather than their quality provided all the excitement. How did Southey No. 2 play so well? All the Southey cricketers in England are in bad form—missing their spicy breakfasts? Wadekar’s going great, and Solkar’s a fantastic chap. Two new young guys—Madan Lal and Patel—almost certain for First Test. The Bengal Prodigy has phailed badly, and your favorite commentator Rajan Bala is trying to make all sorts of excuses for him (read H. Standard of 14th? I’ve sent a critical letter, though it may be too strong for them to print). . . . So what have you been up to? (Besides chasing 7.5 and hatching government plots.) I have been playing some tennis and golf, and promptly ended up with a backache (like Wadekar had last evening vs. Worcestershire.) It has been rather hot, but fortunately not too many power outages. The one day I spent in Cal last month, there was load-shedding from 9 to 1 (morning) and 9 to 2 (night): Thank God this is Punjab, not Bengal. Any news of Surdy as yet? Lob the ball back into court soon—Punjabi.

  The cricket fan, having concluded his locution, folded the missive reverently and handed it back. The man at the bar pocketed it carefully.

  “That was typical of him—all his letters were like that. Whenever he thought of me he dashed off a line. This time he didn’t wait for the vagaries of the railwaymen to subside and my ‘confirmation.’ He came down on the earliest available flight—I was unfortunately away on an official trip to the district.”

  The man’s breath was coming faster now, and he was speaking in jerks. His face was totally bathed in sweat. “When he came to Trivandrum, I wasn’t at home,” he uttered hoarsely, taking a large gulp. “I wasn’t at home.”

  A strange look came over his face. “You should have met my wife. A Bengali girl. Mamta. I’ve always liked Bengalis, and I love Mamta. Wonderful name, isn’t it? Mamta—love and yet not just love, something more, something higher. . . . There was always that ‘something more’ in our relationship, just as there was ‘something more’ in Mamta that set her apart from other girls. . . . Ours was, of course, what they call a love marriage. The first time I met her I thought she was a bitch; we argued bitterly over something inconsequential and parted, each vowing never to speak to the other again. . . . Of course neither kept that vow. She was beautiful, that woman—exquisite—and she was mine. . . .” He took a quick swallow. “I remember thinking she came as near to perfection in a woman as I’ve sought . . . the only blemishes I could discern in her were the imperfectly cured acne of late adolescence and a slight affectation in attitude . . . but those were minor blemishes. I loved her, and she reciprocated. We were married—this time . . . last year. Tomorrow to the day.” He drained his glass again. “I loved my Mamta. She appealed to everything that was weak in me, but I loved her. She was the only woman capable of arousing in me the emotions of possessiveness, of jealousy, of brute, animal passion. I worshipped the very ground she walked on—at least when she wasn’t looking.” He gave a dry, bibulous laugh, but his face still carried that look of intense emotion, and the words seemed to be wrung out of some bloody laceration in his heart. He was not drinking now. “I am a fairly cool person in my everyday dealings, but no one could understand how much Mamta meant to me—how for me, she was my everything, without whom life would have no meaning . . . at all. . . .

  “Karan never understood. I suppose that was his basic defect; with all his simplicity and candor he was incapable of appreciating that I, of all people, could have an even more significant relationship on a deeper level with my wife. He never understood that.” His face was contorted now. In the still, stifling atmosphere of the barroom, no one so much as breathed.

  “I came back from my official trip this evening at 4:30, by car. . . . I let myself in with my ke
y, opened the front door, and stepped into the corridor. Then I saw them . . . they hadn’t even bothered to shut the bedroom door. Mamta never could resist he-men. . . . They heard me, and turned in shock—I will never forget the look on their faces. Somehow it was not merely the infidelity that blew my mind, but the fact that it was Karan—with my Mamta . . . ! In that second, something snapped. I scarcely remember what happened next. There was a ceremonial dagger hanging on the corridor wall as a kind of decoration . . . before I knew what I was doing it was over. I don’t know how often I stabbed them both. . . . I just lashed out at their defenseless, naked bodies till there was no strength left in my arm—then I just stood and saw with horror what I had done. I stumbled to the bathroom. There was blood all over me. . . . I had barely begun washing myself when the bell rang. I froze in terror. Who could it be? The police? A visitor? Some neighbor who had heard the noise—had there been noise? I was too frightened to think. But I had to open that door. I whipped off my bloodstained clothes, quickly washed the blood from my face. . . . The bell rang again. I hurriedly tied a towel around my waist and opened the door in a dead fright. It was the postman. . . . I could have swooned with relief. I accepted the letter, thanked him with a demented grin, and slammed the door—it was only then that I saw the envelope, recognized the handwriting on the cover. Then I broke down. . . .”

  His eyes swam in tears as he relived the experience, and finally the dam burst, the rivulets of salty sorrow came cascading down his cheeks, and he buried his face in his hands, sobbing huge, racking tears as his chest heaved on the bar rail. . . .

  The cricket fan was wide-eyed in horror. Meanwhile, a large man who had been sitting next to him got up, went over to the man at the bar, put a protective arm around him, and said, “Come on, Southey. You’ve got it out of your system. You can go home now.” The man sobbed.