The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories

by Shashi Tharoor

  Sandy swore in a most unladylike way under her breath, but realized there was no escape. She would have to put in an appearance, for politeness’ sake. But she would be damned if it was going to be more than a perfunctory one, whatever her mother might say in that reproachful way of hers afterward. What did Mummy think she could possibly have to say to this son of the soil? And if her parents thought Sandy rude she’d remind them she had never wanted to come anyway. “As far as I’m concerned,” she would say acidly, “this flight to the south every winter is strictly for the birds.” Mummy wouldn’t get the joke, but there would be no mistaking its message. And they would subside again into the mutually resentful truce that always characterized their relations on these visits.

  Every year, without exception, her parents dragged her all the way down to their village homes in Kerala for what they described as a family holiday. This consisted largely of the elders talking interminably to each other about the misfortunes of people Sandy didn’t know, or receiving and paying ritual visits to people Sandy didn’t want to know. As her adolescence advanced Sandy tried to opt out of the exercise and was firmly told she didn’t have the option. “We have to go home,” her father explained, “to renew our roots. I may be working in Delhi, but this is where we’re from and where we all belong.” Once Sandy bitterly asked why, if they wanted to renew their roots, she had to be uprooted. Her father gave her a shocked lecture on the dangers of cultural deracination. “When you’re our age,” he added, “you’ll be grateful we preserved your identity.” Sandy’s more pertinent arguments—that “home” for her had always been Delhi, where she had grown up, not Kerala, where they had—were overruled without discussion. And so she had to leave her friends and records and favorite haunts behind in Delhi to vegetate with her grandparents in Kerala, eat palate-numbing quantities of coconut chutney, and attempt to respond in her insufficient Malayalam to predictable gibes about the “boyish” cut of her hair. It was altogether unbearable.

  Today Sandy’s father was out tramping the countryside in a spotless cream mundu, a pair of thick-soled Bata sandals his only concession to urbanity, catching up on old classmates, while her mother remained “at home” to a miscellaneous collection of distant relatives and nearby acquaintances. The first activity had vaguely appealed to Sandy, but her father had made it clear that her presence would make him most uncomfortable. So she had stayed at home, not holding court by her mother’s side but lying instead on her string-bed, trying with the help of Hercule Poirot not to think about what she was missing in Delhi. When her mother’s summons came, Poirot and she had not been entirely successful.

  Curses exhaled, Sandy walked in, making no attempt to conceal her lack of enthusiasm. She felt a stab of perverse satisfaction at her mother’s evident disapproval of her sartorial standards. She was defiantly wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, both of which clung to her body in a way that made her look, or so her father had disgustedly claimed, like the subsidiary vamp in a bad Hindi movie. (Her father had seen only one Hindi movie, but it had been enough to provide him with an endless stock of stereotypes.) The youth, however, seemed to regard her with a sort of light in his eyes. Sandy noticed this and exaggerated the indifference with which she dropped into a wooden chair and mumbled her hello.

  “Narayani Amma is an old friend of the family, dear,” her mother explained, indicating the matron, who favored her with a cursory glance and continued talking in cascading Malayalam at the top of her not inconsiderable voice. Sandy registered that the oration in progress dealt with the marital misfortunes of a number of good-hearted Kerala ladies who all seemed somehow to be related to each other and to the speaker. What a lot of adult delinquents the community had managed to produce, Sandy thought: every one of the ladies mentioned seemed to have married a bounder, a drunkard, a wife-beater, an unemployable idler, or a crook unintelligent enough to have been caught with his hand in the till, with the prize unfortunate being the Kollengode woman whose husband had managed to combine in his person every one of these deficiencies.

  “Shantakumar is Narayani-Amma’s nephew,” her mother told her by way of introduction to the dehati when her visitor paused for breath. “Her mother’s sister’s daughter’s son,” she added with the precision she customarily applied to the description of such relationships, as if the extra degree of accuracy would somehow render the encounter more full of meaning for Sandy. She briefly tried to trace the lineage her mother had outlined, gave up, and looked away.

  “Shantan has passed his SSLC in the English medium,” the formidable aunt announced with pride. “Go on, boy, say some-thing in English to Kamala edathi.” Sandy’s mother smiled encouragingly, but Shantakumar just cleared his throat in embarrassment, his hands holding the edge of the bench so tightly the veins stood up on them. Sandy rolled her eyes toward the transverse beams on the ceiling. It was going to be even worse than she had feared.

  But Narayani Amma was not one to let silences endure. Putting the brief diversion determinedly behind her, she picked up her disquisition where she had left off. Sandy gathered she had now turned the powerful floodlights of her larynx on the dark sins of the younger generation. “You don’t know what things are coming to here,” she declaimed. “Just as bad as Hollywood, I tell you. Why, in Karanad Chandrika chechi’s very street in Chittilam-chery, well in the street just behind hers, a Nair girl committed suicide by drinking pesticide. Seems she had been having an affair with, you won’t believe this, an Ezhava boy, a common farmhand they wouldn’t have allowed into their house. Someone told Chandrika-chechi the girl found out she was pregnant, but of course she had to be cremated quickly, so no one will ever know. But why talk of Chittilamchery, things are hardly better in our own backyard. Why, just the other week old Gopan Nair’s daughter—you know Gopan Nair, Kallasheri Madhavan Nair’s sister’s husband, whose brother’s son is working for Travancore Chemicals in Madras—well, Gopan Nair’s daughter told her parents, after they had arranged her wedding and everything, that she was in love—can you believe it, in love?—with a Rauther fellow in her class, a Muslim if you please. Can you imagine? They had to stop sending her to school, of course, and some of the Nair boys got together and gave this Muslim a good beating, and told him it would be worse for him if he ever came near the girl’s house again. Apparently he got some sort of laborer’s job in the Gulf or somewhere and went away. But poor Gopan Nair, that girl of his is still refusing to marry anyone. . . .”

  Sandy stifled a yawn. The world of Narayani-Amma’s concerns could not have been farther removed from that of her experience. Delhi, at least her Delhi, seemed to be on another planet, with its discotheques, its music festivals, its fun opportunities to model, to act in plays, to race down Ring Road on the back of Chippie’s motorcycle with her arms around his waist. . . . She broke into what was becoming a self-indulgent reverie and looked at Shantakumar, who quickly averted his own gaze. Dehati he clearly was, a short strong dark figure of a youth clad in a whitish mundu, the long untailored waistcloth that served as all-purpose attire for Malayali males. His simple cotton shirt was a size too small, the collar noticeably frayed from too many washes. His feet were bare and the rough, stubby toes had clearly known many a trudge through the rice paddies. Sandy had no doubt she would find a pair of blue rubber thongs deferentially slipped off outside the front door. The boy’s short, diligently oiled hair was combed backward. Sandy wrinkled her nose at the thought of all that oil. She thought of Chippie, elegant Chippie with his V-shaped denim jackets and the Gucci boots his mother had brought him from Italy. This Shantan (what kind of name was that anyway for a guy?) couldn’t even be thought of in the same breath.

  Narayani Amma was holding forth now on the amorality 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 t
ell 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, Sandy decided. Not that they’ll miss me. She rose abruptly from her seat with a muttered “excuse me” designed not to interrupt the visitor’s conversational flow. Feeling in her hip pocket for her crushed pack of concealed Charms cigarettes, she strode toward the verandah that skirted the house. “Sundari,” her mother’s voice called out, “where are you going?”

  She stopped short as if she had been lassoed and turned in irritation toward her mother. Mummy always had an uncanny instinct for the inconvenient. “Just for a walk, Mummy,” she said. “I thought I might go up to the temple and perhaps do the twilight arati,” she added maliciously. Her mother knew what she really thought of religion.

  “It’s not safe walking around like that, Sundari dear, especially since it’s getting dark,” her mother responded with, Sandy thought, equal malice. “Why don’t you take young Shantan with you for company?”

  Sandy bit her lip. “In that case,” she was about to say, “I’d rather not go at all,” but she caught sight of Shantan’s face and the words dried on her tongue. There was something in his expression—part delight, part anticipation, part nervousness—that changed her mind. “Oh, all right, come along then,” she said, and without waiting for him she crossed the threshold.

  After a few paces, Sandy stood on a corner of the verandah and looked out on 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 screak of unidentifiable insects. She sensed rather than saw the youth’s silent approach, padding across the verandah on his bare feet. Sandy turned to acknowledge Shantan’s presence beside her. Standing, the boy was almost a head shorter than she, and Sandy found herself looking down on him in more ways than one. But there was no doubting the physical strength packed into the youth’s stocky frame; pectoral muscles bulged under the too-tight shirt, and as he lifted his mundu to his knees in a pimhadi to free his legs for the walk, Shantan bared dark calves more muscular than Sandy had ever seen.

  “Come on,” she said in some confusion, “let’s go.” Without waiting for a response, she walked down the steps that led from the verandah to the dusty yard surrounding the house. The boy silently followed. Halfway across the yard Sandy’s steps faltered. She hesitated, unable to decide between the back gate that led toward the village and the side gate that opened onto the rice fields and would eventually take her to the main road. After a brief pause she turned, and the youth said in calm but heavily accented English, “That is not way to temple.”

  Sandy realized in surprise that these were the first words she had heard him speak. “Yes, I know,” she said, feeling the initiative slip away from her.

  “Then why you are walking that way?” Shantan asked simply.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she admitted. “I guess I don’t really want to go to the temple.” The boy’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement, and Sandy felt ashamed of her deception. “I’m sorry,” she added. “Thank you for coming along anyway.”

  “No mention, Sundari chechi,” the boy replied, gutturally gracious.

  Chechi! Shantan was calling her “elder sister.” That was, of course, the Kerala custom: it would be disrespectful of him to address her by her name. “You mean ‘don’t mention it,’” she corrected him with the weight of age and education on her side. “And while you’re about it, don’t mention this chechi business either, for Christ’s sake. We’re practically the same age, aren’t we?”

  The boy digested this suggestion, his small eyes with their dark black pupils still. “How old are you, Sundari chechi?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “Nineteen,” she replied, disarmed by his directness. “And you?”

  “I will be eighteen next month,” he answered. “But according to my school certificate, I am same age as you. My father changed my date of birth to get me admission sooner. They were having too many children in the house, and I am always getting in the way.”

  She laughed, not so much at what he had said but at the gravity with which he said it. “Then you really must drop the chechi.”

  “As you wish, Sundari chechi,” he said, tilting his head sideways and down in that confusing Keralite nod that always left Northerners uncertain as to whether acquiescence or disagreement was intended.

  “No chechi, for Christ’s sake,” she insisted firmly, still laughing. “And my friends all call me Sandy.”

  His somber eyes took that in with a flicker, as if uncertain what to do with the information. They were standing in the middle of the yard, the setting sun in her eyes. “Shall we go and sit down somewhere?” she asked, to her own surprise.

  “Of course, if you like,” she heard him saying, and wondered how on earth she had got herself into a position where the very last thing she would have wanted to do—sit and talk to a bloody dehati, for Christ’s sake—was “what she liked”! At least his English was better than she had expected. “Sundari chechi, I mean Sandy, may I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” she replied uneasily. This was going to be like no conversation she had ever had. Guys like Shantan were completely peripheral to her consciousness: one knew they existed but one never actually met them, let alone talked to them. And now here she was, asking him to sit down with her. Boy, did she need a cigarette. She walked on, the youth, still barefoot, close behind.

  “Sandy”—he said it slowly, as if tasting the unfamiliar sound to test it—”what is the meaning of this expression you are using: for Christ’s sake?”

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

  “And you are just using it again,” Shantan pointed out.

  “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,” he objected simply. “Are you, Sunda—Sandy?”

  “No, I’m not,” she replied, looking at him in some exasperation. They had reached the spot she had intended to escape to when she rose from the chair, a sheltered part of the verandah of the storehouse, out of sight of the main house itself, where she safely smoked the surreptitious cigarettes she still could not light in front of her 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,” Shantan said, as they settled on the smooth stone floor. “But it is all very strange to me. Like you are always saying ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ in English.”

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

  “Nothing, I suppose, but it is not Indian,” he said. “We are not having any word for ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’ in Malayalam language. In our culture you are supposed to show you are sorry, or thankful, by your normal actions and expressions. This English way, it is as if one-two words are enough to pay your debt. No?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Sandy said, taking out a cigarette. “I guess I haven’t thought about it that way.”

  “You see, you are not really Malayali anymore, Sandy.” This time the name was used much more deliberately, as if Shantan had considered the label and determined it fitted. Was it her imagination, or was he eyeing her cigarette with hostility? “You are all very English there, in the city, isn’t it? I mean Westernish. Modern. Like the English and Americans.”

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

  “You should not smoke,” the yout
h said gravely.

  Sandy leaned against the wall, dismayed. “I know, I know, all this stuff about cancer, right?” she said. “But I just smoke two or three a day, you know, it’s not going to kill me.” She began lighting the cigarette in her cupped hands.

  “It is not that,” Shantan replied, as she shook the match out, sending scudding shadows across his expressionless face. “It is wrong for lady to smoke. In Indian culture, you would be being considered bad woman.”

  Sandy’s eyes widened in astonishment, an astonishment deepened by shock and embarrassment as the boy casually plucked the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out on the floor. “Better this way,” he said quietly.

  Her mouth had literally dropped open. A thousand exclamations jostled for voice in her throat. What the hell did this guy think he was doing? Who in blazes did he think he was? What the ef gave him the right? Not one of her peers in Delhi, of either gender, could have dared presume to do such a thing. And this bloody stunted dehati— But she was too angry to articulate any of this, and rage as well as a half-inhaled first puff started her coughing. Even as she spluttered for air her head cleared. He would not understand, and if she made a scene it would all just get back to her parents. After all, if she had the sense not to smoke in front of her elders, she had to have the sense not to do it in front of others with the same attitude. She wasn’t any the less furious, but she had to behave her age.

  She stopped coughing, and looked at him through watery eyes. He was studying her intently, his normally impassive face wearing an expression of sympathy and curiosity. But the expected words of solicitude did not emerge: he just sat there, head cocked to one side, looking at her. “I’m all right, thanks for asking,” she said at last, her voice heavy with irony and suppressed anger.