The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  She tensed at my approach, her knuckles tightening on the door handle. “I—I don’t know,” she said in that small voice, a voice afraid of being used.

  “Hey, it’s no big deal, you know,” I smiled. “I just want to have a little chat while we wait for your Dad, that’s all.”

  She looked at me then, not moving her face, her eyes widening upwards to meet mine. “Papa talked to you about me?” she asked.

  “Yes, yes, there’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “Your father knows me—I’ve been his student for three years, for God’s sake. Relax.” I smiled broadly, reassuringly. So it was this frightened mouse about whom such a collection of myths had been built. Wait till I told everyone what she was really like. “Jasvinder—you know what the guys all call you?”

  “Me? Why should they call me anything?” She sounded positively alarmed. “I don’t know any—guys.”

  “Sure, but they all know you.” I grinned. “Hey, you’re a star on campus, Jazzy.”

  “Jazzy?”

  “That’s what the guys call you. Jasvinder—Jazzy, see?”

  “But—but why? Why? What do I have to do with them?”

  “Look, everyone sees you around, you know, walking with your Dad and Mom, that sort of thing. It’s just a little joke, that’s all. No one means any harm by it.”

  “Jazzy.” Her voice was strained in a mixture of pain and wonder. “If my father hears of this he’ll kill me.”

  “Don’t be silly. Why should he—kill you?” I was beginning to feel uneasy myself. Old Chhatwal, I thought: he wouldn’t harm a fly.

  “He—he’s always told me to keep away from the college boys, to keep to myself. And now you tell me—every boy talks about me?”

  “Look, well, not exactly, you know, not talks about you, just sort of mentions you, if you know what I mean.” I placed my hand on hers, on the doorknob, trying to convey reassurance. She froze with an audible intake of breath, her face flushing. Stupidly, in my awkwardness, I froze too, my hand still on hers. Her flush deepened—and turned to reddening panic as a quiet, hard-edged voice cut her fingers away from under mine.

  “Jasvinder!”

  It was old Chhatwal. He was at the end of the corridor, his body stiff with rage, eyes round with outrage. The girl’s freed hand flew to her mouth in dismay.

  “Go to your room.” He began advancing towards us, his voice still unraised but trembling with the weight of his suppressed fury. The girl backed away from him, her voice almost a whimper. “Papa—but. . . .”

  “Go to your room.”

  “Papa—but—I didn’t—he said—you don’t underst—”

  “Go.” The one word was enough. The girl ran stumbling down the corridor, her face in her hands. She may not even have heard him saying, “I shall deal with you later.”

  “Professor Chhatwal . . .” I had found my voice. “Sir, she—”

  “Shut up.” He was dangerously near me now, and I saw to my horror that his hands were clenched into throbbing, hairy fists. “Get out of my house, boy.”

  “But—but I—”

  “I don’t want to hear another word from you. Get out—unless you want me to throw you out.”

  I most decidedly did not want him to throw me out. Nor did one tangle with professors in this mood. One of the few lessons I had learned early and learned well was the one about discretion being the better part of valor. I would explain, I decided, later—in a letter.

  I futilely waved the recommendation forms at him, then made my way in something of a daze to the door. I heard him shut it quietly behind me, the sound echoing dully in the hollow confusions of my mind.

  For a full minute, perhaps longer, I simply stood on the front steps, not knowing what to do and quite incapable of clear thought. Then I heard her voice again, its hoarseness strained by tears. “Papa—please— I didn’t. . . .”

  A window was open on one side of the house. Impulsively, I ran to it. It was four or five feet above my head. I could not see anything, but the voices carried quite clearly in the still, hot air.

  “I want no explanation. You disobeyed me.”

  “But Papa, he—I—I didn’t. . . .”

  “I am not interested in your protestations, Jasvinder. If I cannot trust you to open the door for a boy without your becoming intimate with him, I will have failed as a father. And I do not intend to fail.” There was a clatter, as if something had been picked up.

  “But—Papa—not that, please—not that again, please.”

  “I am sorry; there is only one penalty for disobedience, Jasvinder. You know the punishment.”

  “Papa—please, I can’t take it. . . .”

  “Don’t waste my time, girl. Bend over.”

  Suddenly I realized what was happening. In my incredulity I knew it was not enough to hear those words. I had to see.

  A few feet away from the side of the house stood a mango tree. Without pausing to think I ran to it and began clambering up. The distinct thwack of wood hitting flesh assailed my ears before my eyes reached the same level as the window. It was followed by a yelp like that of a scalded puppy. I braced myself against the tree trunk, held onto a branch above my head, and looked in.

  They were both turned away from me. Jazzy was bent over the side of her bed, her salwar pulled down from her hips to bare her rear. Despite my shock I noticed, with the absurd precision of a man in a dream, that there was no mole on the exposed buttocks, left or right.

  What there was, though, was an ugly red stripe. And another, as her father, with a swift, strong stroke, brought a wooden ruler crashing down on Jazzy’s pathetically pale skin.

  From my vantage point Chhatwal’s face was in profile. But even at that angle I could see how it was distorted by his anger, how the eyes were puffed up and bloodshot, how the veins stood up on his huge hand as he wielded the ruler in deliberate punition. I was so close he should have seen me, but he was in a world of his own, completely absorbed in a reality circumscribed by his rage, his daughter’s behind, and the instrument by which he could inflict the one upon the other.

  With each stroke the girl flinched, vainly suppressing a cry. The tears streaming down her cheeks fell on her hands, the hands I had so thoughtlessly held. I stood transfixed, watching in a blur the professor’s repeatedly raised arm, the regular rise and fall of the ruler, the shuddering of the girl’s body, the mass of red blotches and welts multiplying across the pale posterior. And then the ruler broke. Chhatwal dropped it in a gesture of finality. He turned to leave the room, and as I tumbled from my perch to the ground I noticed that his face had again been restored to its habitual expression of calm complacency.

  I did not stop running until I had reached my own dormitory block.

  When Hafiz came by for his eau-de-cologne he asked the inevitable question.

  “So did you see Jazzy?”

  I looked at him for a long moment, revelations, explanations, exaggerations clashing within me for release. And then I saw before me the image of Jasvinder Kaur Chhatwal, bared and beaten, whimpering her pain, pleading to be spared.

  “No,” I replied. “She wasn’t there.”

  1975

  Friends

  Sharing the same room, as Camus once wrote, leads to a strange kind of alliance between men. It’s as if they fraternize, not just in the waking day, but in the night too, in the “ancient community” of dream and fatigue.

  That’s the way it was with Vicky and me. We’d shared the same room in the college dormitory for two years, and a special bond had developed between us. It wasn’t just that we were always together; what surprised people more was the infinite delight we found in each other’s company, even after all that time. We faced life together, or what we understood by “life” at college: cut classes together, went to movies together, acted in plays together, chased girls together. If Vicky wanted a cigarette—as he often did—I would be sure to accompany him to the dhaba, even though I didn’t smoke. If I felt like a cup of tea, Vicky, w
ho detested the stuff, would come along with me to the café. There was hardly anything about each other we didn’t know; hardly any problem we didn’t tackle together, any vagary of college life we didn’t turn to each other to surmount. The same situations never ever seemed to stale with us, the same jokes never palled, the same company never turned dull. It was as if we were made for each other in a special kind of way that was different from, and in a way above, our other relationships, even with girls.

  People often said this kind of friendship was dangerous, that sooner or later it would come to an unhealthy end. But somehow Vicky and I had such a perfect understanding of each other that things never reached a head. He would instinctively know when I wanted to be left alone or to study, and I would somehow sense when he was in one of his moods and didn’t want to be disturbed. We turned to each other frequently because we both possessed the same basic outlook on life: mercenary, devil-may-care, self-possessed. We’d have long arguments on things, but both of us were too easygoing to possess ideologies, and the battles often ended in comfortable compromises. We never fought over anything because it was more convenient not to, and somehow, nothing was worth fighting over in any case.

  By some miracle, for instance, we never went after the same girl. As soon as one of us displayed interest in a female, the other quietly turned to look for fresh pastures for himself. In any case, girls didn’t matter enough for us to quarrel over them. To us, girls were meant for light flirtations, to be occasionally brought up to one’s room and given the once-over, to be used when possible to fulfill one’s unavoidable biological desires. Our interest was casual enough to be dispassionate, and we’d usually get together and discuss a recent episode in clinical detail. That’s all there was to it.

  And then one thing that kept us together was our sense of humor—puns were almost our monopoly in the college dormitory and we had something of the reputation of being the local answer to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. You should meet Vicky sometime. He’s the type of person everyone takes an instant liking to: physically small and slight, with a perpetually mock-serious expression on his face, a shock of hair falling over his right eye which he was always unsuccessfully attempting to brush away, a cheerful attitude to people—and a lack of inhibition with his jokes that kept even newcomers in stitches. Vicky was everybody’s friend in a way even I couldn’t manage to be; I was General Secretary of our College Students’ Union, popular but somehow never really one of the guys, while Vicky, who’d campaigned for me and virtually won me the election, had refused a post in my Cabinet so that he could all the more freely criticize me for my shortcomings. You know, that’s the kind of guy he was—everyone wanted him around because they felt he would never want anything out of them.

  In a way that was perhaps a disadvantage. Since he was so much in demand that he never needed to go out of his way to be nice to people, he often ended up unintentionally hurting them. Some of his jokes were just too pointed, many of his comments directly rude, much of his behavior insensitively casual, and he never made an effort to gauge the mood or the spirit of his audience.

  Nor was he a respecter of persons or occasions. But he never suffered for it. Everyone knew he never meant anything seriously, and people easily forgave and forgot his failings.

  Till Rekha came.

  Rekha was not the usual type of sultry siren you imagine breaking up male friendships. Thin to the point of boniness, tall and short-haired, she was attractive only because of a natural grace that lent bearing to her narrow figure, and a small, remarkably lively face that made every sentence she spoke worth watching in rapt attention. Her expressions were astonishingly mobile; her eyes, a deep black in which you felt you could drown, danced in a way that would have captivated the most jaded nawab. But Vicky and I might never have come close enough to notice any of this, were it not for the fact that she was also one of the most brilliant debaters in the university.

  Naturally, I met her at a debate. I had always fancied myself something of a speaker (indeed, with Vicky interjecting from the floor and me declaiming at the mike, there never was an audience shortage at any debate in the university). All the other teams had spoken but us and Lady Wellesley College, and knowing that L.W. was being represented by a fresher team, I was convinced the trophy was ours. Lack of competition always brings out the best in me; I was in my element that day, punning, rebutting, ridiculing the motion. When I stepped off the stage to tumultuous applause, I thought we had won and the first prize was mine. Then Rekha stepped on stage. You should have seen the way the customary buzz of an audience at an uninteresting-looking speaker suddenly stopped the moment she started speaking. That day I learned to give a new meaning to the old cliché about a pin-drop silence, give or take a minor vowel: I dropped a pen and you should have seen the looks I got. She demolished my speech, tore apart Vicky’s half-hearted interjection-and triumphantly strode off with the first prize. It was a virtuoso performance, and, coming from a fresher, a totally stunning upset. Chastened, I went up to her and said, “Congrats.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “You were good.”

  I was about to make some deprecating remark when Vicky strolled up. “I liked your interjection,” she said, smiling.

  “I can see you did,” replied Vicky ruefully.

  “By the way, this is Vicky Vohra,” I said, completing the introductions.

  “VV for short,” Vicky said.

  “You mean wee-wee,” I quickly added, grinning. Rekha laughed.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere to spend your prize-money?” Vicky asked, grinning.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she replied, unexpectedly. “Where do you suggest?”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t dream of depriving you of your hard-earned cash—but PM can rise to the occasion with his second-prize dough.” Vicky puns so often it becomes instinctive, even when he isn’t trying to. “How about the college café, PM?” Vicky called me PM (the initials of my name) because he said it stood for the things I sought in life—prize money, perfect mammaries, and (ultimately) the Prime Ministry.

  “Fine,” I said, and we set out for college, with Rekha walking in the middle. Somehow in any other girl her ready acceptance of our invitation would have been construed as the proof of a “fast” female. But with Rekha it seemed just an indication of her innocent friendliness. And friendly she was; she bubbled over with charm, and to Vicky and me, unaccustomed to a female whose prime asset was not her body, it was an experience just being with her.

  “This is Ramlal’s dhabha” Vicky explained, as we strolled in through the college gate. “He’s been in the college campus ever since we moved from Kash Gate.”

  “Which, as some people unkindly say, is named after him,” I added.

  “Yes, he does very well, dispensing tea and cigarettes to us unfortunates at a few paise above the market price,” Vicky said. “We have to buy from him, though, because it’s a hell of a fag trying to get cigarettes elsewhere. And the liquids he sells are pretty tea-rible too.”

  “You mean they’re kaafi bad?” Rekha asked, mischievously. Kaafi, in this context, is Hindi for “rather,” as well as for the brown beverage. I grinned my appreciation.

  “You’re catching on, young lady,” Vicky approved, paternally.

  We entered the café. For once, heads swiveled around at our entrance—not because we had a girl with us but because that girl was so plain. Our standing as the Casanovas of college took a pretty hard knock that day.

  We chose a corner table and waved Rekha to the first seat.

  “You’ve got me cornered, have you?” she asked.

  “No, no,” I replied, “this way you’ve got an edge over us.”

  She laughed—a soft, musical, exceedingly pleasant tinkle. You really felt you had just delivered an epigram that Wilde might have won an Oscar for. It was a laugh that went straight to the head.

  “Three chairs for us,” Vicky noted, as we sat down. “Hip hip hooray.”

  The waiter materialized, as
our café waiters seem to do only when they see you with a girl. Rekha refused to order anything but a Coke. “I really don’t have much at teatime,” she said in self-justification.

  Vicky, characteristically, was most liberal with his order. He knew I’d be paying. “Eat and be merry, for tomorrow you may diet,” he said, his eyes twinkling. When the food arrived, he raised a piece of toast in the air and said, “A toast—to our young guest . . . Crumbs,” he added, as it slipped and fell to the table.

  “Hey—that’s my bread you’re spending,” I said.

  “Don’t both of you ever stop?” Rekha asked, not looking totally unamused.

  “You gave us a start with that question,” Vicky replied. “The answer is, yes, we do, sometimes—to give the other guy a chance.” He turned his undivided attention to his food.

  “Looking at him eat, you’d think there’s a famine on in this country,” I remarked, not very imaginatively. But it seemed suddenly very important not to let Vicky steal all the thunder from me in front of Rekha.

  “There is, if you’d only read the papers,” Vicky retorted, his mouth full.

  “How can I—you devour them before I have a chance to,” I said, tamely.

  “Really?—that’s news to me,” Vicky replied, and carried on eating.

  In short, it was one of those evenings. Somehow when you sit down and try to recollect it afterwards you only remember the worst jokes. Fragments of conversation are embedded in my mind and yet there now seems nothing remarkable about them. Perhaps that is how it always is with personal memories. I don’t know why, but when I think of that evening in the café, all I can recall is Rekha sitting in the corner, eyes wide in bemusement, listening avidly to us talking and putting in the occasional flattering comment. It was wonderful—one of those occasions you continue to call memorable long after you have forgotten the details of it.

  “What I like about her best,” said Vicky after we’d put her in an auto-rickshaw and sent her off home, “is the way she makes you feel important—you know, the way she hangs on to your every word, laughs at your weakest jokes . . . you really feel like a hell of a big wheel when she’s around.”