The Mountain Shadow

‘The Third Smile is the one we use against other people.’

‘Smiling against people, huh?’

‘Sure. It’s a good one. With some girls, the best smile they’ve got is the one they use to keep people away.’

‘I’m gonna let that pass, and skip to the fourth.’

‘Aaah! The Fourth Smile is the one we only give to the one we love. It’s the one that says You’re the one. Nobody else ever gets that smile. No matter how happy you are with someone, and no matter how much you like someone, even if you like them so much that you love them really, really a lot, nobody ever gets the Fourth Smile except the one you’re truly in love with.’

‘What happens if you break up?’

‘The Fourth Smile goes with the girl,’ she’d said to me that day. ‘The Fourth Smile always goes with the girl. For ex-boyfriends it’s the Second Smile from then on, unless he’s a bad ex-boyfriend. Bad ex-boyfriends only ever get a Third Smile, no matter how charming they are.’

I watched Lisa give the young producer manqué her best Third Smile, and walked to the men’s room to wash off the new dirt I’d accumulated talking to Ranjit.

The black and cream tiled restroom was larger, more elegantly lit, better appointed, and more comfortable than eighty per cent of the homes in the city. I rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, ran some water over my short hair, and washed my face, hands and forearms.

The attendant handed me a fresh towel. He smiled at me, wagging his head in greeting.

One of the great mysteries of India, and the greatest of all its joys, is the tender warmth of the lowest paid. The man wasn’t angling for a tip: most of the men who used the washroom didn’t give one. He was simply a kind man, in a place of essential requirement, giving me a genuinely kind smile, one human being to another.

It’s that kindness, from the deepest well of the Indian heart, that’s the true flag of the nation, and the connection that brings you back to India again and again, or holds you there forever.

I reached into my pocket to give him a tip, and the silver envelope containing Khaderbhai’s letter came out in my hand with the money. Handing the man his tip, I put the envelope down on the wide counter beside the basin, and then supported myself with both arms, staring into my own eyes in the mirror.

I didn’t want to read the letter: I didn’t want to roll that stone away from the cave where I’d hidden so much of the past. But Tariq said that the letter mentioned Sri Lanka. I had to read it. Locking myself in a stall, I stood the sword against a corner of the door and sat down on the hard seat-cover to read Khaderbhai’s letter.

I held in my hand this day a small blue glass ball, of the kind that they call a marble in English, and I thought about Sri Lanka, and those who will journey to there in my name, as you have promised that you will do for me. For a long time I stared at that blue glass ball in the palm of my hand after I found it on the ground and picked it up. In such fragile things and subtle ways is the pattern of our lives revealed to us. We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.

I collected you, Shantaram. You are one of the ornaments of my life. You are my dear son, like all my dear sons.

My hands began to shake: maybe angry, maybe sad, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t let myself mourn him. I didn’t visit the gravestone monument, in the Marine Lines cemetery. I knew his body wasn’t buried there, because I’d helped to bury him myself.

A fever boiled up through my face, chilling my scalp. My dear son . . .