The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  Achan came home from Bombay. I had offered to take a loan which I could pay back later, but he had refused to hear of it. I tried to persuade Amma to take it, but she was too proud. If their land could not pay for Achan’s treatment, they would do without it. I accompanied them back home in a torment of guilt and self-reproach.

  Achan died slowly, his pain eased by stronger and stronger tranquillizers. In one of his last few lucid moments, he whispered hoarsely into my ear as I leaned my head towards his gaunt and shrunken face. “Have no regrets, my son,” he said. “I don’t have any. My time has come. The foreign treatment would only have prolonged my pain. Do not blame yourself about anything. What you did was what you believed in. Do that always, and you will always be right.”

  He died later with a book in his hands, trying through the blurred mists of his suffering to read some well-worn truth, reinforce another belief. I was there to slip the volume from his hands and gently close his tired eyes. I knew that, thanks to him, mine would always be open.

  1981