The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  “What do you mean?” The cricket fan was on his feet. “You can’t simply let him go like that—he’s a criminal! A murderer! He’s confessed—we should call the police!”

  The large man looked at him patiently, like a kindergarten teacher attempting to explain to a particularly belligerent kid that he cannot speak until he raises one finger. “I see you’re new here. This is a pretty frequent occurrence, I’m told—ask the bartender. Poor Southey—unsuccessful novelist, failed sportsman, marital dropout: the murder is a recurring fantasy. And this is the only way he can get rid of it—by working the frustrations out of himself.”

  The cricket fan didn’t know whether he was disappointed or surprised. “And Mamta? What about Mamta?” he asked.

  “She doesn’t exist—she never existed, I’m afraid. She was the main character of his first short story—rejected by forty-seven magazines at home and abroad. He still hasn’t got over it—but he will, poor chap. As long as I’m here, I’ll see he does.”

  “But how do you know all this?” the cricket fan was bewildered. “Who are you?”

  “Oh—yes, I suppose I should have introduced myself,” said the large man with the strangely impassive face, unblinkingly. “I’m Karan Dhillon.”

  1974

  The Professor’s Daughter

  The only remarkable thing about old Chhatwal was his daughter.

  “Old Chhatwal,” we all called him, though no one really knew exactly how old Professor Chhatwal was. He had been at college ever since anybody could remember—and some memories, especially those of the khaki-uniformed mess bearers, went back a long way. As far as anyone knew, old Chhatwal had been planted on the premises along with the foundation stone. Generations of students recalled the same placid face, the wispy, perpetually greying beard that needed neither wax nor net, the immaculate cotton turban in its invariable shade of dark maroon. It seemed he had always looked like that; his students aged in the world outside, but Professor Chhatwal, content in the cocoon of college, remained eternal, as immutable and unchanging as his philosophy lectures.

  Philosophy was not a subject in great demand those days, but Chhatwal’s standing owed little to his skills as a teacher. His lecture notes, it was said, had not been updated since the Second World War, and he read aloud from them at dictation speed, looking up from the yellowing sheets in his hand only to check that the time honored words were indeed being taken down. If anyone was naive, or optimistic, enough to ask a question, Professor Chhatwal’s standard reply was, “I will come to that later.” Sometimes, by ploughing relentlessly on through his changeless text, he did; more often, unless the question was particularly elementary, he did not, and the inquirer learned to take his curiosity to the library, to a senior student, or to another tutor. Most of us acquired old Chhatwal’s wisdom secondhand through notes handed down by our predecessors and went to his classes only to fulfill the minimum attendance requirements for the university exam. On these occasions we usually tried to catch up with our correspondence home, taking care to look up periodically from our writing in order to ensure that our diligence was noted by an appreciative Professor. Frequently, though, we slipped out of class as soon as the roll had been called and our presence registered. In the senior years this habit was so rampant that on one occasion, or so popular legend had it, old Chhatwal paused in his reading to find every seat in the classroom vacant.

  Nor did Professor Chhatwal adopt a more exciting persona outside the confines of his lectures. He never sought conversation, and when it was imposed upon him, replied in the same quiet, measured tones that so effectively put his students to sleep at their desks. Some collegians, infected by the popular tendency to award nicknames to their betters, tried irreverently to dub him Chatty. But even the unsubtle irony of this contraction of the Professor’s name did not guarantee its wide acceptance, for Chhatwal was acknowledged to lack the minimal qualities required to merit even behind-the-back familiarity. It was impossible to arouse him to any kind of animation. There were teachers who, though duds at the blackboard, came to life after hours as Staff Advisers to the Drama Society or the Mountaineering Club, but old Chatty was not among them. Amid the excitement and activity of campus life, Chatty remained serenely unmoved by the energies and passions expended around him. There was a rumor that he had once offered himself as the faculty adviser for a Lepidopterists’ Society, but had not found enough students willing to join one. Though since no one had ever spotted old Chhatwal with a butterfly net—nor, indeed, seen him taking any interest in any other of nature’s creations, winged or otherwise—the rumor was generally discounted.

  And yet Professor Chhatwal was an institution at college. He may only, it was true, have become one by sheer survival, but he was one for all that. He required no outstanding academic achievement, no extraordinary personal characteristic, to affirm his standing. His very presence had made him a frame of reference, a sign of stability, a reassurance that the college’s traditions continued unimpaired. When one of us met an Old Boy at a social gathering or at a job interview, one of the first questions we were sure to be asked was “and how’s old Chatty?” The college’s most distinguished alumni were, almost axiomatically, its oldest ones, and the only professor surviving from their days was the durable Chhatwal; so he correspondingly gained in eminence from being recalled by the eminent. This was reinforced with very little effort on his part: any former student, returning to the campus for a visit and shaking his head over how much had changed for the worse in three (or fifteen, or thirty-five) years, had only to see Professor Chhatwal taking his leisurely constitutional near the Chapel to console himself that some things, at least, were as he remembered.

  Three times a day Professor Chhatwal walked through the college campus: twice to and from classes, and once, in the early evening, for what might, had he revealed more energy, been called exercise. On these occasions he was usually accompanied by his wife, a salwar-kameez-clad matron of indeterminate shape, who waddled determinedly by his side, face set with the effort, steel bangles clinking as she pumped her short arms. Past the dining hall they went, old Chhatwal like lethargy on legs, his wife a curiously ineffective dynamo, across the rose garden, round the Chapel, once, twice, along the library and finally down the dusty path to their campus home. It was an unvarying routine for the professor, and a frequent one for his spouse, but it seemed to make little difference to old Chatty whether he was accompanied or not. In all the years and all the evenings that the two of them took their evening walk together, no one ever saw the Chhatwals exchange a single word.

  The Chhatwal constitutional thus passed into the routine of college, like the gong after classes or the unchanging fare at the mess. The walk was as unremarkable in its regularity as everything else about the old professor. Had he failed to emerge one day, or changed his route, it would have been noticed, but he did not, and the rule about old Chhatwal remained that there was never anything worth noticing about him.

  And then one day his daughter joined him in his walk.

  She must have been in her midteens that first time: fifteen, sixteen perhaps, certainly a year or two younger than the youngest student at college. Some of the boys were dimly aware that Chhatwal had a child, but few had any idea of its age or gender. The child undoubtedly played in her own back-yard, went to school, and did whatever else it was little children did, but her existence had not impinged on the consciousness of the college. Even those who visited the Chhatwal home for tutorials, or in fulfillment of other unavoidable obligations, had never seen her. The impact made by her emergence was therefore little short of seismic.

  I was in my room, at my desk, plagiarizing a tutorial I had received at third remove from a long-departed senior, when Bunny burst in, eyes wild with excitement. “Come and look! You won’t believe this! Come and look!”

  “Forget it, Bunny,” I replied in scholastic indolence. “Can’t you see I’m working?”

  “Just come and see what Chhatwal’s walking around wit
h,” he urged, and ran back to the balcony.

  I sighed, rose, and walked to the edge of the brick veranda to see what the fuss was all about. The first thing I noticed was that about fifty other students, and not all freshers either, had the same idea. The verandas and windows of the surrounding dormitory blocks, usually curtained or shuttered against the afternoon heat, were overflowing with adolescent curiosity. The object of their attention strolled obliviously beneath on the path that skirted our lawn.

  The Chhatwal family was out in strength. By the professor’s side various lumps and layers of matronly flesh swayed and wobbled in arhythmic discordance as Mrs. Chhatwal labored under a too-tight salwar-kameez. By her side walked a slim, fine-featured girl, pale face cheerful in repose, lissome limbs draped in a plain salwar-kameez that seemed to have been made in a different world from her mother’s. The fading sun of early evening cast changing patterns of light and shadow on her face, her dress, her bare forearms, her creamy feet in dark Kolhapuri chappals. We stared transfixed as the procession ambled out of our line of vision. For once Professor Chhatwal’s stately pace seemed too hurried to us.

  When at last they had gone, fifty voices simultaneously exhaled their astonishment.

  “What a chick, yaar!” breathed Bunny.

  “Come on, Bunny, she’s just a kid,” I responded.

  “Enough of a woman for me,” squeaked Chhotu, the shortest of our group, who had pulled a chair to his window to facilitate his examination of the spectacle.

  “Who’d have thought old Chhatwal capable of producing goods like that?” marveled Hafiz.

  That was certainly part of her allure, of course: the incongruity of her parenthood. That, and the fact that she was the only female of any sort between fifteen and forty within the bounds of college. Not only were we an exclusively all-male institution, but there was not so much as a cleaning-woman allowed on the premises, and the dormitory rooms were barred to visitors of the Prime Minister’s sex. The only professors senior enough to be entitled to family housing on the campus were too venerable to have wives worthy of venery, and the only daughter any of them had managed to produce had married and left long before the oldest of my inherited tutorials was written. Little Miss Chhatwal was unique, suigeneris, one of a kind. She instantly became a college obsession.

  Fellows fell over themselves to find out about her. Studies, letters, even games of bridge were abandoned as she walked by. The more adventurous went for walks themselves, respectfully hailing Professor Chhatwal in the hope of being introduced to his offspring, but he invariably acknowledged their greetings with an uncommunicative nod. Whenever he scheduled a tutorial at his house, attendance shot up, though his daughter never so much as walked past his study. If Chhatwal noticed his sudden increase in popularity, he gave no sign of it. He plodded on, while his daughter, and her fame, grew.

  Occasionally, a detail slipped out, and this was seized upon by a hundred eager hands and avidly devoured. The younger Chhatwal’s name, someone discovered—through a stray reference by her father, or a glimpse of a schoolbook on a shelf—was Jasvinder Kaur. “What a name for a girl like that,” Chhotu bleated. “You bloody Surdies name your women as if you were baptising battle tanks.” By almost universal consent, the appalling appellation was transmuted to Jazzy. I suppose it says something about college that we all considered this far more suitable.

  Jazzy did not accompany her parents on their perambulations every day. Frenzied speculation about her absence centered on the demands of homework, though some darkly declared she was just trying to drive them crazy. When she did come along she was as silent and reserved as the rest of the trio. There was no girlish skip or jump in her stride. She walked straight, in even, measured steps, looking at the path in front of her. Never did her eyes stray to take in her onlooking admirers. But each passing month only enhanced her desirability. The colder season brought a flush to her cheeks; her body seemed to be filling out under her sweater. Even I, formerly so dismissive, soon had to acknowledge she was becoming a woman.

  But I don’t mean to imply she was some sort of Venus. She didn’t have to be, to merit our attention. Any “halfway decent chick,” as Bunny put it, would, in that unique position, have done. Jasvinder Kaur Chhatwal was certainly more than halfway decent. The obsession with her therefore grew, unfettered by any sense of proportion.

  “Jazzy” became a new code word for the ultimate in female pulchritude and unattainability. To say of the latest new starlet on the Hindi screen that “she’s in the Jazzy class, yaar” was the highest compliment a collegian could pay. The term was soon extended to mean anything admirable or pleasing—the phrase “that’s jazzy” marked its speaker’s academic affiliations to our college, at a time when the rest of the university was pathetically content with “freaked out” and even the hoary “groovy.” But we were not entirely without a sense of self-mockery: someone dubbed the most efficient waiter in the college mess Jazzy too, and the label stuck.

  The Jazzy legend grew, unnourished by any contact with its subject. For two years after what had been dubbed her “coming out” walk no one at college had so much as spoken to her in person, yet her nickname was on every student’s lips. A passionate interest in Jazzy was something every freshman acquired to prove he was a full-fledged collegian, along with the received prejudices against the Dean and the secret of the unlatched gate through which curfew-breakers could leave and enter campus after 11 p.m. The myth acquired anecdotal accretions, almost all apocryphal. One student had bribed a dhobi to have a whiff of her unwashed laundry. Another had broken into Chhatwal’s house and stolen a bra, only to be informed by the worldly-wise that it was certainly Mrs. Chhatwal’s. A third had clambered up on the roof and looked through the skylight while Jazzy bathed. The stories were always secondhand, always about someone else. Whenever names were attached to any of them, it was always of someone who was no longer around to confirm the story.

  Inevitably with seventeen to twenty-two-year-olds in our cloistered circumstances, the interest in Jazzy took on explicitly prurient overtones. The rooftop admirer had allegedly discerned a mole on Jazzy’s left buttock. This item of received wisdom was passed on with a knowing leer, as if all who alluded to it had verified the mark with their own eyes. If someone wore an exceptionally immaculate white shirt, it was described as being “as spotless as Jazzy’s right butt.” And so on. Freshers being “ragged” were asked to devise the most original ploys for gaining access to the fabled Jazzy. The exercise facilitated their acculturation at college, but none of their ideas were any good. Most proposed knocking on the door and pretending to be a census officer or health inspector (the twit who suggested “gynecologist” was soundly cuffed but grudgingly admired).

  During my final year I decided to apply for admission to American graduate schools. When I told Chhatwal I needed a reference from him, I was not entirely surprised to discover he had never been asked for one before. He looked helplessly at the forms he had to complete, then asked me to bring them to his house after lunch to discuss how he should fill them out.

  I must admit that despite my preoccupation with my own future I was far from unaware that I would be entering Jazzy’s territory. Not that Bunny and Chhotu would have let me forget it. “Ask him to recommend you to his daughter instead, yaar,” Chhotu suggested. Hafiz ostentatiously lent me a bottle of eau-decologne as I prepared to set out for my appointment.

  I felt the heat haze drying up my nervous perspiration as I walked to Chhatwal’s house. But when I rang the bell my sweat broke out cold on my palms again. For it was Jazzy who opened the door.

  She looked at me expressionlessly. “Come in,” she said. Her voice was undistinguished, slightly hoarse.

  I nodded gratefully, finding no words, and followed her indoors. It was dark and cool in the front room. The blinds were down to keep out the sun. “I’ll go tell my father,” she announced, and without waiting for confirmation, turned and walked away from me. I watched her long plait swing b
ehind her, in time with the swaying of her hips. Her hair was not the only thing that had grown since I first set eyes on her more than two years earlier.

  “He’s just finishing his lunch,” she informed me a minute later. “He asked you to wait in the study.” Again I could do no more than nod my acquiescence, but with a hesitant movement of her hand she was already leading the way down the corridor.

  “This way.” The voice was decidedly unremarkable. I thought of the couplets my friends had composed to a voice they had never heard. “Like moonlight made audible,” Bunny had extravagantly recited. Not even twilight, yaar, I would tell him.

  As she ushered me into the sunlit, bookless room that Chhatwal called a study, I took my first good look at her. She was eighteen, long-limbed, full-bodied. With the sun behind her back I could make out the outline of her shape under the flower-patterned cotton kameez. My pulse quickening, I found my voice. “Er—you are Jasvinder, aren’t you?”

  She had half-turned to leave the room but stopped at the door, startled. “How—how did you know my name?” she asked.

  “Oh, I think your father told me once,” I said airily. “Which college do you go to?”

  She looked uncertainly around her. “My—my father told you?” she asked, her voice even hoarser.

  I began regretting the lie, but I couldn’t change my tune now. “Yes, he has often mentioned you,” I plunged in recklessly. “I’m Har Bhajan Singh. Everyone calls me H.B.”

  “I’d better not call you anything,” she said. “My parents won’t like it.” Her eyes darted nervously down the corridor. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  “But you just let me in,” I pointed out reasonably.

  “Only because my mother is ill,” she said. “Please—I must go now.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right,” I said, very much the older male now. “I’ll tell your father.” I had not sat down; now I moved closer to her. “Relax,” I added, looking directly into her eyes in an effort to still them, to hold the dark pupils in place.