By the Same Author
Fiction
The Great Indian Novel
Show Business
Riot
Nonfiction
Bookless in Baghdad
Nehru
India
The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone
Copyright © 1990, 1993, 2011 by Shashi Tharoor
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarly to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The stories in this collection were first published in the following magazines: “The Five-Dollar Smile” (The Illustrated Weekly of India, Chicago Review); “The Boutique” (JS); “How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink (Eve’s Weekly); “The Village Girl (Eve’s Weekly); “The Temple Thief” (JS); “The Simple Man” (JS); “The Professor’s Daughter” (The Illustrated Weekly of India); “Friends” (this story was published as “The Synergists” in JS); “The Pyre” (Youth Times); “The Political Murder” (Gentleman); “Auntie Rita” (Eve’s Weekly); “The Other Man” (Eve’s Weekly); “The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer” (New Review, Cosmopolitan, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Portable Lower East Side); “The Death of a Schoolmaster” (The Illustrated Weekly of India, Discovery).
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-409-3
eISBN: 978-1-62872-504-9
Printed in the United States of America
To my father
CHANDRAN THAROOR
the first reader of many of these stories, who saw the potential in the scribblings of a difficult child and did everything possible to nurture it—this book is offered with love and gratitude
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
The Five-Dollar Smile
The Boutique
How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink
Village Girl, City Girl: A Duet
The Village Girl
City Girl
The Temple Thief
The Simple Man
The Professor’s Daughter
Friends
The Pyre
The Political Murder
The Other Man
Auntie Rita
The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer
The Death of a Schoolmaster
Foreword
Since the publication of The Great Indian Novel and Show Business, I have been asked many times, by a wide variety of people—ranging from an interviewer from Canada to a student at Wellesley College (not to mention a smattering of former readers of Indian magazines now living in this country)—about my earlier stories. Their interest has tempted me to make these pieces available to a new readership.
The stories collected in this volume were all written (and for the most part published) during the period that spanned my adolescence and early adulthood. The earliest among them, “The Boutique,” was published when I was fifteen, and most of the rest were written in a spate of collegiate creativity before I turned nineteen. They largely reflect an adolescent sensibility: with one or two exceptions their concerns, their assumptions, and their language all emerge from the consciousness of an urban Indian male in his late teens.
To put them all in perspective, perhaps a few general words of background are in order. I wrote from a very young age, my first “story” emerging when I was six. I was an asthmatic child, often bedridden with severe attacks, and rapidly exhausted the diversions available to me. I found few books on the family’s shelves that appealed to me, and those I read inconveniently fast. Purchases were expensive and libraries limited: many libraries let you borrow only one book at a time, and I had an awkward tendency to finish that in the car on the way home. Perhaps the ultimate clincher was that there was no television in the Bombay of my boyhood. So I wrote.
My imagination overcame my wheezing. My first stories were imitative school mysteries like those by Enid Blyton that all my classmates read. By the time I was nine I was attempting to churn out heroic tales of wartime derring-do. Here I was more than derivative: I abandoned any patriotic pretensions and wrote about an RAF fighter pilot called Reginald Bellows. When the first installment of Operation Bellows appeared in a new youth magazine, I was a month short of my eleventh birthday.
There is nothing quite like the thrill of first seeing your writing in print. It ranks with the other great moments of your life, the first school prize, the first kiss, the first smile from your baby. I had found my métier.
My next few stories continued to be inspired by my childhood reading. I remember a Stephen Crane-type U.S. Civil War story (where the Yankee father ended up killing his Confederate son on the battleground, or it may have been the other way around) and one about a pair of school children who save a young king from assassination at his own coronation (the Shah’s imperial extravaganza to mark the 2,500th year of his mythical dynasty was much in the news at the time, I believe). Finally, as I became a teenager, I started trying to depict the worlds I knew and saw around me. Improbable fantasies about distant lands seemed suddenly less interesting than writing about people like myself and the things that occupied our minds.
The audience was ready-made: Indians who read Indian mass-circulation magazines. I was writing to be published and read, not to pursue an obscure literary aesthetic. This in turn helped define the nature, and the limitations, of my work. In selecting these stories, I have omitted some that friends and family remember with pleasure but which now seem unworthy of resurrection. Yet the ones that have survived between these covers are fairly representative of the whole. I enjoyed writing them and hope some of that enjoyment proves communicable.
—S. T.
Acknowledgments
The stories in this collection originally appeared, some in slightly different form, in JS, The Illustrated Weekly of India, Eve’s Weekly, Youth Times, Gentleman, The New Review, and Cosmopolitan. Today all but one of these journals is defunct, but I should like gratefully to recall them and thank the editors (or fiction editors) who encouraged my early writing—the late Desmond Doig, Gulshan Ewing, Sadhan (Charlie) Banerjee, Jug Suraiya, Dina Mehta and Anees Jung. They have all published many better stories than these, but by finding space for my work they launched me on an adventure in which I am still, these many years later, happily engaged.
In publishing this book I should also like to express my gratitude to many outside the magazine world whose advice and kindness I have never forgotten—Mrs. Gopi Gauba and Mrs. Tapati Mookerji, whose early praise for my fiction helped me acquire both confidence and discipline; the many school and college friends whose feedback was the source of my continuing inspiration; the late Erica Kalmer, agent and translator, who brought me to the attention of a European audience by publishing many of the stories in this collection in German; Sri Kesava in Singapore, a warm and engaging friend whose enth
usiasm for these stories sadly coincided with economic misfortune; and Han Suyin, whose generous regard for my writing—and her exhortation that I must “engage in a long and pitiless novel, which will allow (my) talent a wider scope”—helped me persist at the key-board. And a word of appreciation for the old (and new) friend who remembered many of these stories and who read this collection with wisdom and insight: thank you, Ramu.
The Five-Dollar Smile
“MAKE THIS CHILD SMILE AGAIN,” the black type on the crumpled, glossy news weekly page read. “All it takes is five dollars a month.”
Joseph stared at the picture sandwiched between the two halves of the caption. He had seen it a thousand times—the tattered clothes, the dark, intense, pleading eyes, the grubby little fingers thrust tightly into a sullenly closed mouth. The photo that had launched the most successful, worldwide appeal in HELP’s history, four years ago. His picture.
As usual, he viewed it once more with that curious detachment that had come to him during those last four years. He could not see it as a photograph of himself, a record of his past, a souvenir of his younger childhood. It was not personal enough for that; it was in the public domain, part of an advertisement, a poster, a campaign, and now an aging magazine clipping in his hand. The little boy who stared out at him was not him, Joseph Kumaran; he was part of a message, defined by a slogan, serving a purpose, and the fact that he was Joseph Kumaran did not matter. It never had. Joseph looked once more at the picture, as he had five times already during the flight, as if to reassure himself that he knew what he was doing on this large, cold, humming monster hurtling him towards a strange land he had known only in postage stamps. That’s what this is all about, he wanted the picture to say. That’s who you are and the reason why you are on an unfamiliar thing called an airplane and why your feet don’t touch the ground but your toes feel cold and you have to put a belt around your waist that stops you from leaning forward comfortably to eat the strange food they expect you to get at with plastic forks and knives, sealed impossibly in polyethylene, while you wish you could pluck up the nerve to ask the poised, distant, and impossibly tall, white lady to help you, help you with a blanket and two pillows and some real food you can eat without trying to gnaw at sealed packages of cutlery. . . .
He folded the picture again and pushed it into the pocket of the tight little blazer he had been given the day he left the HELP office with Sister Celine to go to the airport. It had been sent with a bundle of old clothes for the disaster relief collection, he had learned, and though it was a little small for him it was just the thing to smarten him up for the trip to the United States. “Always be smart, Joseph,” Sister Celine had said. “Let them know you’re poor but you’re smart, because we knew how to bring you up.”
Joseph sat back, his feet dangling from the airplane seat, and looked at the largely uneaten food on the tray. When he thought of food he could remember the day of the photograph. He had been seven then: that was the day he had learned he was seven.
“How old’s that little kid? The one in the torn white shirt?”
“He’s about seven. No one’s really sure. He came here when he was a little child. We couldn’t really tell when he’d been born.”
“About seven, eh. Looks younger.” Click, whirr. “Might be what I’m looking for. Get him away from that food, Sister, will you please? We want a hungry child, not a feeding one.”
Suddenly, a large, white hand interposed among the tiny, outstretched brown ones crowded at the table, pulling Joseph’s away. “Come here, Joseph. This nice man wants to see you.”
“But I want to eat, Sister.” Desperation, pleading in his voice. He knew what could happen if he was too late. There would be no food left for him: it had happened before. And today was his favorite day, with crisp papadams in the kanji gruel. He had watched the cooks rip up and fry the papadams from behind the kitchen door, and he’d tried to get to the table early so he wouldn’t miss out on his share. He’d had to fight the bigger boys to stay there, too. But what determined resistance had preserved, Sister Celine was taking away.
“Please, Sister, please.”
“Later, child. Now behave yourself.” He was dragging his feet and she was pulling him quite firmly by the left hand. “And if you don’t walk properly I shall have to take the cane to you.” He straightened up quickly; he knew the cane well and did not want it again.
Would the stewardess take a cane to him if he asked her for a fork and knife? Of course she wouldn’t, he knew that. He knew his nervousness was silly, unnecessary. He was suddenly hungry, but he didn’t know how to attract her attention. She was giving a man a drink several rows in front of Joseph.
“Miss!” he called softly. His voice came out huskily, tripping over dry obstacles in his throat. She didn’t hear him; he wished desperately that she would catch his eye, and he trained his look on her with such fearful intensity it was unbelievable she should not notice. “Miss!” he called again, waving his hand. She was sticking a pin into the headrest of the man who’d bought the drink, and she still didn’t hear.
“Miss!” This time it was too loud. It seemed to Joseph that everyone in the plane had turned to look at him, as if he had done something very odd. There were a couple of smiles, but for the most part people looked disapproving, frowning their displeasure at him and making comments to their neighbors. Joseph’s dark cheeks flushed red with embarrassment.
The stewardess straightened up, controlled her irritation, and smiled sweetly but briskly as she walked down to him. “Yes, what is it?”
“Can-I-have-a-knife-and-fork-please?” The words came out in a rush, Sister Angela’s diction lessons forgotten in his anxiety.
She hardly seemed to pause in her stride. “It’s on your tray—here, on the side, see? In this packet.” And she lifted the packet, placed it on top of the napkin for him to see, and before he could say anything more, strode off down the aisle.
“Hold it there, kid.” Joseph, seven, wanting papadams, confronted American slang for the first time in the person of a large, white man with a mustache and a camera. To little Joseph, everything seemed large about the man: his body, his mustache, his camera. A large hand pushed him back a little and a voice boomed: “Seems rather small for his age.”
“Infant malnutrition. Mother died in childbirth and his father brought him through the forest alone. These tribals are astonishingly hardy. God knows how he survived without any permanent damage.”
“So there’s nothing really wrong with him, right? I mean, his brain’s okay and everything? I’ve gotta be sure I’m selling the American public poverty and not retardation, if you see what I mean. So he’s normal, huh?”
“Just a little stunted.” Sister Celine, quiet, precise. Click, whirr. Lights exploded at him. His eyes widened.
“Let’s take him outside, if you don’t mind. I’d like to use the sun—I’m not too sure of my flash.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Cleaver. Come, Joseph.”
He squirmed out of the nun’s grasp. “But, Sister, I want to eat.”
“Later. Now if you’re difficult there’ll be no lunch at all for you.”
Resentfully, he followed them out into the courtyard. He stood there sullenly, staring his quiet hatred at the large man. Click, whirr, click. “Move him to this side a bit, won’t you, Sister?”
It was being pushed around that made him thrust his fingers into his mouth, as much in self-protection as in appeasement of his palate. The photographer clicked again.
Joseph turned to look at the stewardess’ retreating back in profound dismay. Why hadn’t he told her that he knew he had a knife and fork, but he didn’t know how to get at them? Why hadn’t he made clear what exactly was the help he needed? Why had he been so scared?
He drew himself even more deeply into his seat and looked around nervously. His neighbor, staring out the window, smiled briefly, mechanically, at him. Joseph could not ask him to help. Or could he? The man turned from the window to a maga
zine he was reading over dinner. Joseph’s resolution faded.
That day, after the photographs, there had been no papadams left for him. Only cold kanji; the papadams were already finished.
“See—I told you you could have lunch later,” the nun said. “Here’s your lunch now.”
But I wanted the papadams, he wanted to scream in rage and frustration. And why did you need to take me away from my papadams? What was so important about that man with the camera that you had to deprive me of something I’ve been waiting a month to enjoy? But he did not say all that. He could not. Instead, the lump in his throat almost choking him, he flung the tin plate of gruel to the ground and burst into tears.
“Good heavens—what’s the matter with him today? Very well, no lunch for you then, Joseph. And you will clean this mess off the floor and come to my office as soon as you have done so, so that you may be suitably punished for your ingratitude. There are many little boys not as fortunate as you are, Joseph Kumaran. And don’t you forget it.”
Sniffing back his misery, Joseph knew he would not forget it. He would have six strokes of the cane to remember it by.
How could he ask his neighbor to help open the packet? He was so engrossed in his magazine. And he was eating. It seemed so wrong, and so embarrassing. Joseph tried to speak, but the words would not come out.
At the head of the aisle, another stewardess was already bringing tea or coffee around. The other passengers seemed to be finishing their meals. They would take his tray away from him and he would not even have eaten. A panic, irrational but intense, rose to flood him.
He struggled with the packet. He tried to tear it, gnaw at it, rip it open. It would not give way. The cutlery inside the packet jangled; at one point he hit a cup on his tray and nearly broke it. Joseph’s attempts became even wilder and he made little noises of desperation.
“Here,” his neighbor’s strong voice said. “Let me help you.”
Joseph turned to him in gratitude. He had hoped his desperation would become apparent and attract assistance. It had worked.