The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  Sunder stifled a yawn. The world of Narayani Amma’s concerns could not have been farther removed from that of his experience. Delhi, at least his Delhi, seemed to be on another planet, with its discotheques, its music festivals, its fun-loving chicks who modeled, who acted in plays, whose enameled fingers snaked round his waist to hold him tightly as he raced his motorcycle down Ring Road. . . . He broke into what was becoming a self-indulgent reverie and looked at Susheela. She quickly averted her own gaze. Behenji she clearly was, in her adolescent pavada and davani, the long skirt ensemble with a half-sari-look worn by teenage Malayali damsels. Her nails were clipped and unpolished, her face devoid of makeup except for the film of talcum powder patted on by every rural Keralite, her feet bare (Sunder had no doubt he would find a pair of blue rubber thongs deferentially slipped off outside the front door). Otherwise, Sunder had to grant she was pretty in a typically Malayali way, all kohl-rimmed eyes and dimples and long black tresses that wore the sheen of years of diligent oiling. He wrinkled his nose at the thought of all that oil. In Delhi he wouldn’t have given her a second look. He’d be damned if he would in Kerala either.

  Narayani Amma was holding forth now on the moral standards, or lack of them, of a particularly winsome Vallenghy schoolgirl whom she swore she had personally, with her own eyes, seen in a movie theater with a boy who was not her brother. “It’s all this education these girls are getting these days. All they know about right and wrong is what they need to pass their exams. Nothing else. I tell you, Kamala, it is all the fault of this Communist government. The moment they insisted on free and compulsory education, I could see it coming. . . .”

  This is where I quit, Sunder decided. Not that they’ll miss me. He rose abruptly from his seat with a muttered “excuse me” designed not to interrupt the visitor’s conversational flow. Feeling in his hip pocket for his crushed pack of concealed Panama cigarettes, he strode towards the veranda that skirted the house. “Sunder,” his mother’s voice called out, “if you’re going for a walk, why don’t you take Susheela with you and show her the garden?”

  He stopped short as if he had been lassoed and turned in irritation towards his mother. She had always had an uncanny instinct for the inconvenient. “For Christ’s sake” were the words springing to his lips when he caught sight of Susheela’s face. There was something in her expression—part awe, part delight, part anticipation, part nervousness—that changed his mind. “Oh, all right, come along then,” he said, and without waiting for her he crossed the threshold.

  After a few paces, Sunder stood on a corner of the veranda and looked out onto the paddies stretching into the distance. Dusk was descending with the rapidity of the latitude, the sunlight curling off the edges of the sky. The palm trees bordering the far end of the rice fields were beginning to darken in the shadowy embrace of the approaching twilight. It was still, the quiet broken only by the screech of unidentifiable insects. He sensed rather than saw the girl’s silent approach and looked down to acknowledge her presence beside him. She was standing, her mouth partly open in nervous excitement, and Sunder found his perception of the girl widening to take in two more details. First, she was even shorter than he had guessed: she came barely up to his shoulders. Second, her figure, concealed by the davani but no longer distorted by her sitting posture, was as close to female perfection as he had ever seen.

  “Come on,” he said in some confusion, “I’ll show you the garden.” Without waiting for a response he walked down the steps that led from the veranda to the dusty yard surrounding the house. The traditional fruit trees stood around the yard—mango, jackfruit, banana, all serving a functional rather than aesthetic purpose—but that was quite typical, and not what his mother had meant him to display. What was special in this house was that one corner of the yard had been miraculously brought to life and, unusually for these parts, sustained grass and blooming flowerbeds. The family was inordinately proud of this triumph over both nature and custom.

  “That’s it,” he announced redundantly with a general wave of the hand, not quite knowing how to go about showing a girl a garden.

  “It is beautiful,” she said simply, and Sunder realized in surprise that these were the first words he had heard her speak. He could almost imagine her reciting the “Yinglish” sounds from a list of phonemes in Malayalam script. “What those flowers are called?”

  She was pointing to a cluster of bright yellow blossoms. “I haven’t a clue,” he admitted. “And I couldn’t name anything else in the garden either,” he added hastily. She laughed, a musical tinkle, and Sunder felt disarmed rather than offended. “Then there is not much point in showing the garden, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “Would it not be better to simply sit and talk, Sunder etta?”

  Sunder etta! Ironic transference: the behenji had gone and made an elder brother out of him! That was, of course, the Kerala custom: it would be disrespectful of her to call him by his name. “Sure, if you like,” he found himself saying. “But forget about this etta business, Susheela. I’m only nineteen, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And I am only seventeen,” she replied shyly. “But I am becoming eighteen next month. That is my star birthday, you know, according to our Malayalam calendar, not my date birthday.” She was flushing, as if she had said too much. “Sunder etta, may I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” he replied uneasily. This was going to be like no conversation he had ever had. Conversing as an etta to a village bebenji in primary school English was going to be, he reflected, a whole new scene.

  “Sunder etta, what is the meaning of this expression you are using: for Christ’s sake?”

  Sunder laughed. “Meaning? It doesn’t really mean anything, for Christ’s sake, it’s just an expression . . .”

  “And you are just using it again,” Susheela giggled.

  “Look, it’s just a way of saying, you know, emphasizing something. Haven’t you heard of the expression “for God’s sake?” It’s the same thing—God, Christ, what’s the difference?”

  “But you are not Christian,” she objected simply. “Are you, Sunder etta?”

  “No, I’m not,” he replied, looking at her in some exasperation. They had reached the spot he had intended to escape to when he rose from his chair, a sheltered part of the veranda of the storehouse, out of sight of the main house itself, where he safely smoked the surreptitious cigarettes he still could not light in front of his family. “But that’s not really relevant, see? You don’t have to be Christian. It’s just an English expression. You don’t have to be English to talk English, right? “I mean, look at you,”

  “Yes, I see,” she nodded, as they settled on the smooth, stone floor. “But it is all very strange to me. Like you’re always saying ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ in English.”

  “What’s wrong with saying sorry and thank you?” he asked, fishing for his cigarettes.

  “Nothing, of course, but it is not Indian,” she said. “We are not having any word for ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ in Malayalam language. In our culture you are supposed to show your—sorrow, or your gratefulness—gratitude, by your normal actions and expressions. This English way, it is as if one or two words are enough to pay your debt. Isn’t it?”

  Sunder had found his pack. “I guess I haven’t thought about it that way,” he admitted, taking out a cigarette.

  “You see, you are not really Malayali anymore.” She drew in her own breath at her boldness and asked anxiously, “I hope I am not, how do you say, offending you, Sunder etta?” He shook his head, smiling. “But really, it is very English there, in the city, isn’t it? I mean Western. Modern. Like England and America.”

  “Hardly,” Sunder began, then wondered. “Well, perhaps, in a certain way. Hey, do you mind if I smoke?”

  “No, of course not, Sunder etta,” the girl said. Sunder leaned against the wall, lighting a cigarette in his cupped hands. He shook the match out, and the gesture sent scudding shadows across the girl’s attentive face. It did not
occur to him to offer her one: it was inconceivable that she would smoke. “In what way, Sunder etta?”

  “In what way?” Sunder looked at her and saw a beautiful girl, no longer nervous, at his feet. Her expression, laden with curiosity and interest, drove any coherent answer out of his mind. “What do you mean, in what way?”

  “I mean, in what way is your life in the city like the foreign countries?” For once her words were halting. “I can see you are so modern, Sunder etta. Here in the village I am knowing nothing of the kind of life you are leading in the big city. It must be so different. Please describe it to me, Sunder etta. I am really wanting to know.”

  “Aw, it isn’t all that dramatic, Susheela,” Sunder replied. “But haven’t you been to a city? Not Delhi, perhaps, but Bombay? Madras?” She shook her head. “Not even Cochin?”

  “I have never left the district, Sunder etta. The farthest I have ever gone anywhere was to the Guruvayoor temple, with my Amma.” That, Sunder knew, was about two hours from the village by bus: he had had to make the same trip a few times. “Why would I be going to a city? My father is a marsh in the village, a schoolteacher.”

  “But don’t you have any relatives in Bombay or Madras? Or someone to visit on a holiday?”

  She shook her head silently, and Sunder knew that holidays meant even less to her than this one did to him; in fact they meant nothing at all. You could not travel very far on a village schoolteacher’s pay. “Heck, I’d better tell you then, huh?” he suggested lightly. “Big buildings—lots of cars, crowds, concrete. No rice fields! Water out of taps and not out of a well. Telephones . . .” The nearest telephone connection was in a town eighteen miles away. Sunder went on, describing stereo systems, air-conditioning, chewing gum, television (Delhi was the only Indian city with TV, so though no one in his right mind watched the boring black-and-white documentaries it offered, it was worth boasting about). As the girl soaked it all in in wide-eyed appreciation, he became more expansive, taking in the University Coffee House and the Houses of Parliament, the sound system at the Cellar, the foreign dignitaries visiting Rashtrapati Bhavan. Her wonder about the city then focused on him as its principal inhabitant. The questions became more personal: what did he eat for breakfast? Did he know how to drive? What did he smoke? Did he have girlfriends? What were his plans after college? He spoke airily of not being able to decide between management studies and taking the Foreign Service exams, and spoke with intellectual disdain of the cocktail circuit that both would condemn him to. Had he stepped out of a spaceship on Mars he could not have been greeted with more avid, and admiring, curiosity. Each answer, each trivial detail, seemed to elevate him in her esteem; he was unique, her sole means of intimate access to a world she knew existed but with which she had no contact. And yet, Sunder realized even as he spoke, the access he offered was entirely illusory: she lacked the framework, the knowledge, the vocabulary to translate what he was saying into terms she could relate to and evaluate. She had heard, but she had not really understood.

  “What do you do?” he found himself asking. “I mean, you’ve finished school, right? Are you going to college now?”

  “I—no, I am not going to college,” she replied in a low voice, looking down at the floor as if ashamed of her answer. “I did well in my SSLC, but my father—my father, he does not believe in college education for me.” She shook her head violently. “It is not his fault, he can only afford the fees for one child and my brother is more important, he is doing B.S. in agriculture. Everyone says the future is in that. It is costing a lot, my brother has failed twice already, and there are the hostel fees and all. What is a girl going to do with a college degree anyway, my Amma says, will it help me make better idlis for my husband?”

  “But your father’s a schoolteacher!” Sunder protested. “Surely he doesn’t go along with that?”

  The girl said nothing. Then, for the first time since he had asked the question, she looked directly at him. “He says a girl has to graduate from homework to housework,” she said quietly. “I am getting married next month. The week after my star birthday.”

  Sunder did not know how to react. Married! She was seventeen, barely out of petticoats. His instincts told him to show how appalled he was; his conditioning impelled him in the opposite direction. “Congratulations,” he said formally, wondering if that was another word for which there existed no Malayalam equivalent.

  “They arranged everything,” she went on in an emotionless tone of voice. “He came with his family to inspect—to see me, last month. I wore a sari for the first time and served them dosas I had made with my own hands. They said yes.”

  “And you? Did you like him?”

  “He is thin and dark, with pencil-line moustache. His two front teeth stick out a bit. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, but I could smell arrack on his breath. He was married before, his last wife died, no one is knowing how exactly. He has small child from her, a two-year-old girl.”

  “But why do your parents want you to marry someone like that?”

  “Because of all this—these—circumstances, his family is not asking for any dowry. They are only wanting a good, homely bride who can cook and look after the house and the little girl. It is a good family, known to my maternal uncle. And he is holding government job, clerk in the Collector’s office. Everyone is saying we are very lucky.”

  “And what do you feel about all this?” Sunder felt deracinated urban outrage welling up in him as he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “Eh?” She would not answer. Avoiding his accusatory eyes, she looked down at the floor. Unthinkingly, he put a hand under her chin and lifted her face to meet his gaze. “Are you happy about this?” he asked.

  Her eyes glistened. “With my SSLC marks I was elgib—eligible for University scholarship,” she said tonelessly. “I only had to submit application. I filled it in, got all certificates from school. Only thing I needed was my father’s signature. I took the papers to him, I said look Achan, look what your daughter can do, it will not even be costing anything. He took the forms from me and said, very sadly, so Susheela, you want to go study for four years. Then tell me, who will be marrying you four years from now? Will we again find someone from good family, with secure job, and without dowry? These are dreams, child, it is time to wake up. And he tore up the forms.”

  Sunder struggled with anger and impotence, and anger about his impotence. “They can’t do this!” he burst out, knowing even as he spoke the words that they were absurd. Of course they could do this: it was what millions of Indian families did.

  He saw the tears slowly overflow her eyes and begin to trickle down her cheeks. Helplessly, one hand still holding up her chin, he raised the other to her face to wipe away the tears. With a sudden movement she caught it and kissed his palm. Soft lips pressed against the hot wetness of her own tears, and Sunder’s free hand fell startled from her chin. It was not a conscious motion, and it should have simply fallen to his side, but it did not. It fell upon her breast, and after that there was nothing anymore he could do to prevent what happened.

  Neither of them spoke a word. When they had rearranged their clothes and begun to walk back to the house in silence, it was dark. There were a hundred things Sunder wanted to say, but he was too suffused with guilt and shame to find the words. It was, of course, all his fault. He, the experienced city slicker, he with the smooth talk and the plastic fantasies and the fishnet T-shirt, had cynically taken advantage of an innocent village girl. She had sought admission to his world, and he had taken her body. True, he could recall no resistance to his caresses, but the girl was probably too surprised to resist and too ingenuous to know how to. In the dark he had not really been able to see her face, but her silence was plain enough. He had ruined her. He had destroyed the illusions of a simple village girl, a nervous, trusting young thing who called him Sunder etta.

  They reached the veranda of the main house. In a few steps they would be at the doorway of the living room, and it would be too late to s
ay anything. He could not leave everything unsaid, even if expiation was impossible. He caught her by the arm and, in a strangulated voice, spoke the only words that occurred to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She had taken the first step from the yard to the porch and the moonlight suddenly bathed her face. It was lit up in the radiance of dreams fulfilled, and her smile was no longer that of a nervous girl, but of a woman who had touched a happiness she had not expected to be hers.

  A cloud passed, but Sunder found himself grateful for the darkness.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you—Sunder.”

  1972

  City Girl

  Sundari, known to her friends and intimates at Delhi University as Sandy, hated being in her grandfather’s house in Kerala. She hated even more having to pretend she didn’t hate it. And since she had been summoned downstairs by her mother for a bout of obligatory socializing with the rural masses, that was just what she would have to do.

  Sandy stood at the foot of the stairs looking into the long hall, which served as salon, dining room, clothes-drying area, and thoroughfare in the ancestral home, and cursed her lack of alternatives. It was bad enough having nothing to do, which was her usual condition on these annual duty-visits to Kerala. It was decidedly worse having to do something she didn’t want to do. In calling out to her, her mother had said she would “meet someone your own age.” Knowing Mummy, this could easily turn out to be a precocious fourteen-year-old schoolboy who wanted to talk about his stamp collection. Sandy peered around the doorway. The youth sitting on the bench against the wall, next to a white-haired matron of formidable aspect, looked closer to her real age than to her mother’s usual estimation of it, but he was certifiably a dehati, a village type. Making conversation with him, assuming they had ten words in common, was going to be even less stimulating than rereading the dog-eared Agatha Christies she had found in her grandfather’s cupboard.