The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  “What’s a man without an ego?” To Arjun the question seemed profound, yet self-answering, as if there could really be no doubt about its meaning: nothing, of course. He gazed at her with deep respect, not simply because of what she’d said but because of its applicability to him, and not just because it flattered his own vanity but because it legitimized what he had often been told was his own most glaring defect. The sin of self-obsession attributed to him by the well-rounded nymphet could now be washed away in the purificatory waters of the all-excusing ego. What a difference between Auntie Rita and the girl at home; what a difference between a mature, wise woman of the world and a flighty sixteen-year-old slattern who flirted with you and never gave you a chance to find out where exactly you stood with her. . . .

  “It’s seven. Shall we go down?” Arjun nodded, his reverie shattered, and instinctively glanced at his watch, a prophylactic move for self-protection that froze stillborn as Auntie Rita lost her footing for a moment and fell heavily against him. In the same moment she recovered her step, even before Arjun could start to make a move to hold her protectively and prevent a fall, but the feel of her body still lingered against his. Blood pounding, he followed her swaying hips and dangling plait down the steep stairway that led to her flat.

  Auntie Rita. Somehow, despite everything, it had first come as a bit of a shock to him to feel sexually aroused by his uncle’s wife. All his seventeen years of disciplined obedience to parental dicta made his overexercised conscience initially rebel against the thought. I mean, all I’d have to do would be to hit her first to add incest to injury, he rather facetiously told himself, arguing futilely against the stirrings of his incipient id. But it didn’t work. When you’re seventeen, and just discovering your masculinity, few things stand in the way of a potential sexual adventure, even if it’s with your aunt—in this case, especially if it’s with your aunt.

  Even then, coming to Calcutta to spend his autumn holidays—the “Puja vacations,” they called it in Bengal—with his uncle hadn’t been his idea. His uncle, a diffident, good-natured, insecure introvert with a vague and troublesome sense of familial responsibility, had invited him down more because it was the expected avuncular thing to do rather than out of any particular fondness for his precocious nephew. But since he didn’t expect a refusal, and was kind enough not to hint he’d welcome one, he didn’t get any. Arjun came to Calcutta, lock, stock, and shaving-set (freshly purchased, locally-made, never used), and announced his intention of staying two weeks. Then, on the second day of Arjun’s mildly uneventful stay, Uncle Kumar was suddenly called away on a business trip. After a brief moment of panic—disruptions of schedule rarely featured in the Kumar routine of existence—Auntie Rita and Arjun helped him pack, and drove him in the ‘64 two-door Herald (which Rita managed pretty well) to the station.

  “I’ll try to get back as soon as possible,” Kumar had said nervously through the bars of his first-class compartment just before his train left. “Look after Arjun, Rita,” he’d yelled as an afterthought when the train moved away.

  “I will,” she shouted back, but he was too far away by then to see the strange light in her eyes.

  On their return she’d suggested a short walk on the terrace. “The terrace” was a magic word in their locality, conjuring up vistas of air and open spaces, though all you could really see from it was a host of other terraces, pathetic, dirty, with the occasional washing line standing out from the rows of cisterns and heavy piping. So they’d walked talking, and Arjun had been able to discover more in her to attract him than before. Especially her wonderful powers of understanding. . . .

  Over dinner, served by the knave-of-all-trades, Raju, who was cook, sweeper, and washerman to the Kumar family, Arjun was moved, not by the intensity of his passion for Rita—which he felt painfully between his thighs—but by its sincerity, which hurt him mainly higher up. He didn’t eat very well that night—it’s a bit of a handicap when your heart’s halfway up your throat—and the occasional contact of her hand when she passed him a dish across the little table meant for four (Kumar never had occasion to invite more than two guests) added sharply to the poignancy of his feeling. Rita, he said to himself over and over again, except when he was dealing with the rasagollas, I love you.

  When dinner was finished they sat and listened to music—a slightly scratched and infinitely old version of “Does Your Heart Beat For Me,” Arjun noted with a deep sense of premonition—while the servant washed up and left. The door clicked shut and the record suddenly came to a stop—a coincidental synchronization that seemed fraught with significance to Arjun: the end of a phase, a tense purgatory with perhaps the promise of better things.

  “I’ve had enough of music,” Rita said, getting up to switch off the player. “Let’s talk for a while, shall we?”

  “Sure—fine,” Arjun replied, suddenly flustered despite himself, and getting up too, for want of a better move.

  “It’s rather uncomfortable sitting out here—shall we go inside?” she asked, and Arjun’s heart lurched.

  “Yes,” he croaked, his throat suddenly dry. She walked normally, almost casually, with the familiar roll of her thickening hips beneath the slightly fading red sari. Yet now, her every step filled him with an overpowering consciousness of her sensuality.

  They sat on the bed, looking at each other, and Arjun involuntarily licked his lips in partial dread of what might be coming.

  She smiled suddenly, innocently. “So how’s your first term in college been?”

  The question was so innocuous, so pedestrian, and for that reason, so totally unexpected, that Arjun was momentarily caught off guard. College? First term? Damnitall, was that all she was going to talk about? For a second he was merely surprised, then a flood of disappointment deluged him. The suddenness of the anticlimax was perhaps what got him really hard. First term in college, indeed! And then, a rush of blood to the head—I’ll show her. . . .

  It happened too quickly for chronicling convenience. Without hesitation, he leaped the gap between him and Auntie Rita and was suddenly on top of her, pushing her onto her back in a spurt of aggressive male dominance that nearly ended in both of them falling off the bed, devouring her in the ardour of his passion as they fought not so much against each other as against the law of gravity.

  For her it was more a question of preserving her precipitous balance than her tenuous chastity. To his credit it might be pointed out that he didn’t know what he was doing.

  Not even when Auntie Rita came up with a series of half-hearted protestations, “No . . . Arjun, we mustn’t be doing this. . . . Arjun, really . . . please . . . no, Arjun . . . what will uncle say?”

  Even the “What will uncle say” didn’t stop him. His heart was already in his mouth and hers in his right hand as lines of half-remembered elegiac poetry ran through his mind, persistent, like some kind of overlapping commentary in a badly produced Films Division documentary:

  If on earth there be paradise of bliss,

  it is this, it is this, it is this. . . .

  When he woke up in the morning he was alone, sleeping spread-eagled in sartorial disarray, his hair all over his face and a strangely triumphant feeling ringing in his head. The sound of the shower in the adjacent bathroom permeated his consciousness. Soon afterwards, Auntie Rita—he still couldn’t start thinking of her as anything else—appeared, dressed for the day in the customary accoutrements of her sex and standing.

  “You can use the bathroom now,” she said. He nodded, smiling a trifle apprehensively, not very sure whether she was going to disapprove of him. She smiled in reply, sweet and self-composed again, and walked up to him. “Listen . . . Arjun—about last night. . . .”

  “Yes?” his heart was pounding within the aching confines of his ribcage.

  “. . . don’t you have anything?”

  “Don’t you have anything?” The color left Arjun’s shocked face as he stumbled backwards in embarrassment and confusion. “Don’t you have anything?
”—but then—then what about last night? Doubt, dread, and gelid fear crept into his mind. But . . . he’d been sure he managed—he had managed, hadn’t he? They had—they—had—they had made love, hadn’t they? Yet . . . “Don’t you have anything?” He thought he had, he couldn’t be sure, of course, but—was there something more that adults were supposed to have that he didn’t or . . .

  “I mean a condom, silly. Don’t you have anything?” Realization dawned on him like a bucket of cool water suddenly being flung, refreshingly, on his head. (Unfortunate metaphor.) “Oh-er-no, I’m afraid not,” he stammered. “But I’ll get one today, Auntie. I . . . I definitely will.”

  She looked at him, half-amused, very slightly exasperated, and as her luscious lips parted in a smile and he took a hesitant step forward to kiss her, the doorbell rang. “Namaste, memsahib . . . it’s me, Raju.”

  And Arjun was left standing in the room, his hands partially stretched out to draw her into an embrace, his mouth still half-open in expectation of delight.

  The man seated cross-legged behind the counter, an obese, obscene-looking lala in a dirty white dhoti and little else, speculatively scratched the three days of stubble on his chin, snarled at no one in particular, and turned to look questioningly at Arjun. To Arjun the look—accompanied as it was by an expressive clawing of the man’s corpulent frontal bulge—seemed fraught with accusation, and he hastily averted his gaze from the cardboard Nirodh box behind the glass plate and stared fixedly at the first items of merchandise his eyes fell on.

  “You want some of those?” the rasping, businesslike tone of the lala’s voice brought Arjun to the sudden realization (this was his week for realizations) that he had been intently contemplating a row of nipples for baby bottles. With a jerk he swiveled around to the shopkeeper, stuttering uncomfortably, “Er—no—no—not at all, thank you.” The lala accepted his refusal with equanimity, scratched his back, picked his nose, and farted loudly. Overcome by the feculence of the atmosphere, Arjun walked a few hesitant steps away and halted again, uncertain what to do. He couldn’t run away from his responsibilities that easily. Damnitall, what was there to be afraid of? He had pictured himself earlier, approaching the solitary pan-cigarettes-and-minor-provisions store on the street with a swagger, thumping fifteen paise on the counter and nodding casually at the Nirodh box. The neatly dressed, probably bespectacled salesman would be polite, deferential, respectful, and even perhaps slightly envious of Arjun’s looks and apparent sexual status. He would pull out a strip, hand it over to Arjun, who would nod his appreciation, pocket it, and stroll casually away. That had been the general idea, and a pleasantly prepossessing one it had been, too.

  Then things had begun to go wrong. To begin with he couldn’t find any change, and the prospect of asking for a Nirodh with a ten-rupee note at the corner dukan made his heart quail. Perhaps he could buy something else, something worth eighty-five paise, or nine rupees eighty-five paise, or some such, and say casually as the fellow hunted around for change: “Oh, don’t bother, throw in a Nirodh to make it a round figure.” And the shopkeeper would, of course, comply with gratitude and bless the young fellow’s thoughtfulness. Desperately, Arjun had thought of something he might need. A box of chocolates, perhaps? Then the incongruity of the combination—chocolates and a Nirodh—made him do some radical rethinking. Besides, a further thought—after all, this was his next-to-last tenner after buying his return ticket, and he couldn’t possibly spend it all on a contraceptive.

  Steeling his determination, he had walked, nearly tripping over himself with the uncomfortable sensation that all eyes were on him, to the shop. A few people were lounging about, lighting cigarettes and cracking jokes in Bengali; to Arjun it seemed as if every joke was about him. He was sure they could read the guilt written all over his face; they must be laughing at his transparent ingenuousness. . . . His face flushed as he turned, cheeks burning with shame and guilt and a debilitating sort of fear, and looked around the shop. Through the glass pane he could see a box of the government-subsidized contraceptives, yellow and red and white, the package dominated by some infantile cartoonist’s prototype of a happy family (the man’s mustache, he noticed, was a northern curler, rather than the pencil-line advertised in Madras) smiling out at him in the carefully measured euphoria of planned parenthood.

  Arjun felt far from happy. There was an uncomfortable, rubbery sensation in his legs, and the omnipresence of the lala revolted him. The contretemps of the artificial teats did it; he didn’t want to stay anywhere near there for another moment. But as he began to walk away, already imagining the whole world’s mocking laughter ringing in his reddening ears, second thoughts struck him. Where else could he go? There wasn’t another corner store of this type anywhere in the locality. And he had to get the Nirodh; what would Auntie Rita say?

  . . . don’t you have anything?

  Arjun plucked up his courage and turned to the shop again. He’d be damned if he was going to muff it this time. He could feel the eyes of all the cigarette smokers burn into his back. So what, let them stare, he told himself defiantly. His face was hot with the flush of shame, and his brow was studded with beads of perspiration. He strode up to the counter and leaned uneasily against it.

  “Give me a Nirodh, please,” he demanded in a hoarse, sibilant whisper.

  “Kya kaha aap ne?” the lala asked at what seemed to Arjun the top of his voice, straining his ears with the effort of hearing and scratching himself even more profusely.

  “A Nirodh, please,” articulated Arjun, dying of embarrassment.

  “What? What?” By now all eyes were upon them.

  Arjun manfully fought the impulse to turn and run.

  “Nirodh,” he said, softly but clearly, “ek—one—Nirodh.” He pointed awkwardly but firmly to the box under the glass-pane.

  “Nirodh?” the lala seemed puzzled. “Oh, Nirodh” his face cleared. “No, no, this isn’t Nirodh. I keep chewing gum in the box—Nirodh yahan biklta nahin hai.”

  Arjun gave a deep sigh. To his own surprise, it was one of relief, not agony.

  He probably wouldn’t have known how to use the damned thing anyway.

  When he got back Auntie Rita was finishing her work in the kitchen with Raju.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “Just went for a stroll,” he answered, not very convincingly. She looked up briefly into his face, then looked down at the chopped vegetables again. “Did you get it?”

  “Get what?” his studied attitude of innocence at the question betrayed the answer. She looked up at him, into his eyes. He averted his face. “No,” he said, his features crumpling.

  She smiled. “It doesn’t really matter,” she reassured him cheerfully. “Now will you please dump all this into that vessel over there while I wash up?”

  After lunch they made love again, Raju, who normally slept in the kitchen, having been given the afternoon off. When they finished neither of them dropped off, but lay in each other’s arms for a long while. There was a small, contented smile on Auntie Rita’s face, and Arjun felt this was the most beautiful moment of his life. Coitus interruptus notwithstanding.

  “You looked different when you were three,” she said, and giggled. The illusion was shattered; seventeen-year-old men lying nude in a woman’s arms do not like to be reminded that they’d lain nude in the same arms as sniveling, hollering infants and probably weeweed on them in the process. Arjun felt embarrassed; he’d have preferred to have felt Auntie Rita.

  He felt both for the next week, the one inside him, he inside the other; and in the torrid nights and sultry days, they each discovered unsuspected depths in the other. Quite apart from the sex, a curious rapport sprang up between them; a liaison based not on physical intimacy but on a curiously metaphysical understanding. It was beautiful, Arjun often told himself. And his initial vague stirrings of conscience were smothered in their incipience by a line from Somerset Maugham’s The Bread-Winner that Auntie Rita pointed out to him: />
  You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct. . . .

  Somehow it was all too good to last, he supposed afterwards, but while he was in Calcutta their idyllic world never looked anything but permanent. The order of their daily lives seemed to fit into some kind of divinely ordained pattern that didn’t seem to need change.

  Uncle Kumar was to come back the day before the date on Arjun’s third-class train ticket, but even his telegram threatening his return and asking to be met at the station was quickly forgotten in Auntie Rita’s arms. They laughed, and kissed, and made love, gorgeously wallowing in the luxury of each other’s bodies, and Arjun felt a greater joy than he had ever felt in his seventeen years of existence. It was a singularly painless affair, happy, smoothly moving, a sustained, fluffy bed of roses. . . .

  Till the last night, when Arjun broached the subject of Uncle Kumar’s return. He was lying on her in her bedroom, and he’d just kissed her when he realized the bed wouldn’t be free the next day for him to kiss her again. “Uncle Kumar’s coming back tomorrow,” he said, softly and seriously, looking intensely into her eyes.

  She didn’t answer; he repeated his statement. “Uncle Kumar’s coming back tomorrow,” he said, earnestly.

  “Mmm,” she replied, looking away from him. She made no move to elaborate.

  “What’ll we do then . . . Rita?”

  “Oh, shut up, will you?” she suddenly burst out irritably, turning back with a jerk to look at him. “I know he’s coming back, so forget it.”