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143 pages

English

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The Five-Dollar Smile is a collection of stories of young love and disaffection, adolescent high spirits and youthful traumas; there are also stories, written with the energy and passion of youth, which deal with very adult subjects: death, deceit, loss, hypocrisy, honour. Sensitive, compelling and persuasive, these stories, written for the most part in Shashi Tharoor s late teens and early twenties, reveal an already formidable talent. Rounding off the collection is a marvellously inventive play set in the time of the Emergency.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	31 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351180999
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SHASHI THAROOR

The Five Dollar Smile
Fourteen Early Stories and a Farce in Two Acts
Contents
About the Author
Also by the Same Author
Foreword to the Stories
The Five-Dollar Smile
The Boutique
How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink
The Village 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 to the Play
Twenty-two Months in the Life of a Dog
Cast of Characters
Act One
Act Two
Footnote
Cast of Characters
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE FIVE-DOLLAR SMILE
An elected member of Parliament, former minister of state for external affairs and human resource development and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of fourteen books, both fiction and non-fiction. A widely published critic, commentator and columnist, he served the United Nations during a twenty-nine-year career in refugee work and peacekeeping, at the Secretary-General s office and heading communications and public information. In 2006 he was India s candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General, and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders. He has won India s highest honour for overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers Prize. For more on Shashi Tharoor, please visit www.shashitharoor.in.
ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fiction
Riot
Show Business
Non-fiction
The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-First Century India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond Bookless in Baghdad: And Other Writings about Reading Nehru: The Invention of India Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-First Century
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
Foreword
The subtitle to this collection of short stories is both an apology and an explanation. They 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. Most of the rest were written in a spate of collegiate creativity before I turned nineteen. They have been only marginally revised for inclusion in this volume.
So much for the explanation: but what of the apology? The stories largely reflect an adolescent sensibility: with one or two exceptions their concerns, their assumptions, their language, all emerge from the consciousness of an urban Indian male in his late teens. If I presume to inflict them years later on a new public, it is not because I think they represent an enduring contribution to literature, but because I hope that, in their own modest way, they might be fun to read.
I wrote essentially for a specific audience-the readership of Indian magazines in the English language. Most of these stories do not aspire to do more than entertain. Why, then, revive them today? For one thing, they reflect aspects of modern Indian life which are still relatively ignored in more serious writing. For another, since the publication of The Great Indian Novel I have been asked many times, by a wide variety of people-ranging from an interviewer in Bombay to a student at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, not to mention a smattering of ex-college friends and former readers of JS - about my earlier stories. Their interest has tempted me to make these pieces available again to a new readership. While no publisher would wish to resurrect the dozen or so stories I published before the earliest one in this collection, the works chosen here may be of interest beyond mere curiosity about my juvenilia. I have therefore prefaced each with a short introduction, placing the story in the context of its creation.
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, who rapidly exhausted the diversions available to me. Like every first child, I found few books on the family s shelves that appealed, and those I read inconveniently fast. Purchases were expensive and libraries limited: many 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.
I often had to sit up in bed to do so, but my imagination overcame my wheezing. My first stories were imitative school mysteries in the Enid Blyton tradition, but without the Enid Blyton flair. (My Indian equivalent of the Five Find-Outers and the Famous Five were the Six Solvers. They tracked down various villains in adventures with titles like Solvers on the Trail that nobody but my devoted father and a handful of friends ever read.) By the time I was nine I had discovered Biggles and 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 Junior Statesman was founded (later, in deference to its trendy teenage readership, to become JS), my father sent off my fiction to the editor, Desmond Doig. To my great surprise the Solvers came back by return mail but Bellows got the thumbs-up. When the first instalment of Operation Bellows appeared, in the magazine s second issue, 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 life, the first school prize, the first kiss, the first smile from your baby. Not even the fact that I had written of Bellows in deadly earnest while Doig s blurb compared his deeds to Baron Munchausen s could dampen the sweet sense of achievement I experienced on seeing my story unfold in the pages of the magazine week after week. I had found my metier.
My next few stories remained imitative and inspired by my childhood reading. I remember a Stephen Crane-type US Civil War story (where the Yankee father ended up killing his Confederate son on the battlefield, or it may have been the other way around) and one for The Illustrated Weekly about a pair of schoolchildren who save a young king from assassination at his own coronation (the Shah s imperial extravaganza to mark the 2500th year of his mythical dynasty was much in the news, I believe, at the time.) Finally, as I became a teenager, I started trying to depict the world 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 be read, not to pursue an obscure literary aesthetic. This in turn helped define the nature, and the limitations, of my work. Some of my efforts were more forgettable than others: one or two that friends and family remember with pleasure now seem unworthy of resurrection. But 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.
I am surprised to still hear suggestions that there is something artificial and un-Indian about an Indian writing in English. Those who level this charge (usually in English) base themselves on a notion of Indianness that is highly suspect. Why should the rural peasant or the small-town schoolteacher be considered more quintessentially Indian than the pun-dropping collegian or the Bombay socialite who is as much a part of the Indian reality? India is a vast and complex country; in Whitman s phrase, it contains multitudes. The world depicted in these stories is a very narrow slice of it, but it is Indian for all that. The critic M.K. Naik once suggested that the acid test ought to be, could this have been written only by an Indian? For most, though not all, of my stories, and certainly of my novel, I would answer that this could not only have been written only by an Indian, but only by an Indian in English. In that, and in the pleasure I hope these stories will impart, lies their principal vindication.
New York
October 1990
Shashi Tharoor
The Five-Dollar Smile
Written in a lonely hotel room in the unfamiliar environs of Geneva as I embarked upon my first assignment with a humanitarian agency, The Five-Dollar Smile was an attempt to come to terms with a number of my most immediate concerns- the experience of geographical and emotional dislocation, the internationalization of aid for the needy, the nature of the charitable impulse. Consciously rejecting my own new-found perspective as a UN official pledged to serve the world s refugees, I tried to write the story from the point of view of the recipient-/cannot say beneficiary-of assistance rather than the provider of it. I had often seen advertisements like the one described in the story, and wanted to look beyond their obvious message to the needs and feelings of the children they depicted. Joseph s situation is a universal one-he could easily be an African, Latin-American or Indo-Chinese child, and the story would not change.
The Five-Dollar Smile is one of only two stories in this collection that I wrote in adulthood , the other being The Death of a Schoolmaster, written three years later. I was twenty-two when this was published, and somewhat surprised that I could still remember what it felt like to be a child.
MAKE THIS CHILD SMILE AGAIN, the black type on