Just a little smile...

Sometimes I feel the need to talk about inconsequential details about people. I sourly asked a very close friend if he developed crushes easily. “Yes. And I also know how to crush them off easily,” he said. And then he said something really beautiful. “I guess I have had a crush on every single girl I’ve known; all they have to do is smile.” Suddenly there was so much weight into the seemingly trite conversation. ‘All they have to do is smile'.

My mind soon conjured up collages of flashing teeth, twinkling eyes and dents on the cheeks. I saw the faces of the baby in next building to the latest fresh face on the hoarding of new body shampoo advertisement. I could never imagine they would be among the images I would even think off. They always seemed quite mundane and forgettable. Maybe their smiles lingered in the vortex of my memory and rose to the surface by this sudden churning.

When I was a child someone asked me what was the longest word in the dictionary. For me then, untouchability was the longest word I had ever heard and I was proud that I remembered it long after the Community Living class was over. I was left open-mouthed when he told me I was wrong and the longest word was smiles. I laughed at him saying he was a fool and he didn’t know English. He gave me a seemingly cheesy reply saying that it’s the longest word because there is a mile between the two s. I was more than convinced then that he didn’t know English and was trying to cover it up. He then told me, “Smile is the only thing that can take you miles ahead to others.” I slid down from the sofa and left him with his limited knowledge of English and bad teeth that peeped from his perpetual smile and forgot all he said.

Then one day someone, who only drew the sketches of his best friend and the prettiest girl around, insisted he draw my sketch. My ears turned beetroots. He said I had a beautiful smile, adding sheepishly, “It’ll take you places.” I was flattered; I was hearing it again.

I am terrified of facing an audience; no one believes me when I say so. But I am. My lips quiver like a light feather suspended by a twig and I feel the entire audience just waits to watch when the feather will finally be blown away and will land in a puddle of muddy water, soak up the muck and drown. So when I was delivering one of my first speeches onstage, the feeling was no different from the usual. And I had already delivered two flops before that and so I was even more terrified. Yet when I was called amongst one of the winners, I grabbed the mike and asked the judges if they got the names right. One of them walked up to me and said he wanted to meet my parents. “I want to meet the family of the girl who has the pleasure of being sunbathed by such a radiant smile all the time.” There it was, a moment of déjà vu. I smiled my way to a prize.

Very soon I stepped into a much larger world that was hotter, dustier and harsher. My expressions also underwent a number of changes. Grimness replaced the smiles for a seemingly serious and I-mean-business look. I frowned more and pursed my lips even more. My smile became formal and no one seemed to care much about it, as I didn’t seemed to care about theirs. In fact I smiled more in e-mails and SMSs that I did in life. I was alarmed this morning when my first instinct on meeting someone was to reach out to the Shift, : and 0 keys on the keyboard. It was then I knew I had indeed forgotten how to smile.

When I thought of my immediate present, it looked like a topsy-turvy world with nothing that was of any consequence. I smelt stale, thought shallow and looked sour. Most of my conversations revolved around the inane and irrelevant. I felt I was losing the power to read into the deeper sub-text of simple yet valuable things…

And then I met this old friend and we started taking a stock of our lives and he told me what I just told you before. Slowly things started coming back. Initially they were blurred; then like a montage and finally like a steady 36 mm film. So many girls won the heart of this tough cookie just by smiling at him. Even it was for a whiff of a moment; they won something. Just like the baby in the next building and fresh-faced poster girl had their smiling faces sedimented in my mind. I gave them their moment of victory the second I they rose through the layers of my mind onto the surface, in front of my eyes.

Really I now knew why my world seemed all topsy-turvy. As a child there was a grumpy man on the cover of the book. He was named ‘Dukhiram’ (the sad one). The riddle was to make him ‘Sukhiram’ (the happy one) without using a pencil. All we had to do was turn the book upside down and the grumpy face became a smiling face. When I stepped out into the open, out crammed spaces and cobwebbed thoughts with this old friend, the world turned upside down. Everything was really so simple. There was beauty and value even in the mundane.

And soon it was time for us to go into our respective worlds again. I looked at my friend and smiled. I knew his heart skipped a beat. I did walk an extra mile, won a heart after a very long time.