Anaadi’s Smile
Winner of the 2022 “Tobias Wolff Award” in Fiction
Years later, the village headman would sigh, “A place without a smile is a pajama without a drawstring – the minute you stand up and walk away, it collapses around your ankles.”
Our drawstring stretches many miles from the bustling city of Calcutta to the tiny, sleepy hamlet called Panapukur, named after one of Bengal’s many large water hyacinth ponds where hopes, dreams, and shaming secrets are buried under purple blossoms and chubby frogs.
Here in Panapukur lay long lives simply spent. Days went by in the clenching of fists and the pinching of paisas. Nothing wild or wonderful ever happened. Nothing, that is, until the arrival of the baby Anaadi and his enchanting smile.
Anaadi’s father, Fatikchand, hankered after one thing pure and plain as a prayer. Rude health. Refuge. And after seven daughters (if it pleased goddess Durga), a strapping lad.
Everyone knew that Fatikchand was born during the big famine, when the earth had cracks like the ones in the soles of his feet. Anaadi’s mother, Dhara, was born during the floods in a place up north by the banks of the Teesta, a river with lush curves that changed its course often.
Anaadi looked nothing like either of them. It was as though their longed-for son flew down to earth through a conspiracy of angels. It was said that when he was born, he did not cry until he was slapped gently. Even as he drew first breath after that wail, he smiled – just like a two month old!
For weeks, villagers came to see him. Wise women gathered around. Billing was involved, and even some cooing. They scanned him from nose to navel. They caressed his fine hair, counted his tiny toes.
“Such long lashes! Why is his skin so golden, when ours is like tea steeped too long?”
“A perfect bottom, too. Not too squishy, not too firm.”
“Look. He’s smiling again.”
“That’s no smile. It’s probably gas.”
“It’s a lovely smile, gassy or not.”
Anaadi’s mother remembered all the seven times she brought her daughters into the world in the middle of a busy day. The mounting sharpness of every spasm, the precise color of the sky as she winced up at it. She knew for certain exactly the different things she flung down before each birth (nettle, seedling, needle) with the sudden cry, “It’s time!”
But Anaadi’s birth? She never spoke of it. It was like he had come to her in a dream.
The time and day he was born? “Dates? Of what use are dates? What is tomorrow will soon become yesterday.” No. Dates were not the stuff of daily discourse in Panapukur.
When Anaadi asked his uncles when he came into this world, they waved their hands vigorously behind their shoulders to indicate a time long gone. “Those days.” His aunts held up their hands to show how big some of his siblings had been when he came into their life. “This high.”
He asked the local midwife. She shook her head. Her memories of birthing babies had blurred into each other. She did not traffic in numbers. Only names. Rough-hewn names, close to the soil, handed down for generations. The name Anaadi, for instance, meant one who was without end or beginning. It was also another word for the god Krishna.
Anaadi was born around the time the calabash thief was finally caught, she said. Her own great grandmother was not so lucky. She was born the same week that Potla’s sheep had lambs that looked suspiciously like Potla. Or so some said. The lambs even called him Baa-baa. Father. What more proof did one need?
She chattered on. Anaadi was not remotely interested in Potla. Surely there was more to his destiny than cattle and calabashes? He gazed into the distance, imagining whole worlds that lay out there.
* * *
Little Anaadi slept with his three sisters on a pallet on the floor (the four oldest sisters were married). This was very convenient for them, as they blamed the wet patches on him.
They pretended to make him look for their missing milk teeth.
“Find my front tooth, and I will give you palm candy.”
He looked diligently under pots and pans with a worried frown, but he never found any teeth.
After his sisters grew a little older, they began sleeping in the only other room they had. He tied their braids together while they slept. His mother scolded him, but his father said it was a handy precaution. If one girl tried to tiptoe out at night when the local boys whistled, all of her sisters would wake up from the tug on their braids.
When Fatikchand returned after selling his modest harvest, his daughters threw themselves higgledy-piggledy at him to see what he had brought for them. They gently tugged at his earlobes and complained about Anaadi’s knack of getting into mischief. Food got burned, and the donkey ran away because of him. Then it was the boy’s turn to climb on his father’s lap and tell him exactly why everything was everyone else’s fault and not his. Fatikchand laughed and kissed him and called out for dinner. His wife sat by his side and fanned him as he ate.
Fatikchand slowly fed Anaadi handfuls of rice and lentils with scolding patience and love. In his eyes, Anaadi could do no wrong.
One Sunday, Anaadi’s father drank wine made of mahua flowers at the bhatikhana, the distillery down the road. As the evening wore on, he counted on his fingers the names of all his daughters. He calculated the dowry each girl would need and wept. Then he staggered home and banged on his door.
When his wife answered, he mistook her for his long-lost plough. The children woke up from all the noise. He paused in honest bewilderment and spoke to his wife urgently, “Who are these children? Send them back. Wait, why am I no longer wearing my lungi?” Anaadi giggled at him, and was quickly shushed. His long-suffering wife draped his lungi back on his skinny hips.
“No, no, clearly there isn’t anything for the man of the house to wear,” he said, and proceeded to stitch lungis through the night out of any sheets he could find. Up and down went his drunken hands in a sewing motion as he sat, blissfully unaware of the absence of thread. His wife, unmoved, yawned.
Fatikchand finally sat back satisfied. His wife humored him by admiring his nonexistent handiwork and led him to his bed. There were loud snores; a few stray dogs barked back. Soon the night fell silent.
Days flew by. Anaadi smiled as he sharpened strips of wood and made pretty little toys and carts for his sisters, and switches that he sold for men with oxen. He pretended to brush the switches ever so softly on them. Flick! Flick!
Anaadi smiled as his sisters blew hard into the chullah coal oven with bellows to make it burn hot and bright. He poked at their puffed-out cheeks till they popped and everyone collapsed in laughter. His mother had to take over before the fire died and puff out her own cheeks to brighten the flames instead.
The village elders always said Anaadi had brought laughter to the village.
These were the memories that Anaadi carried in his knapsack when he reached the big city of Calcutta at the end of his wanderings.
There were some images of childhood that had to be tightly pressed inside one’s mouth like a ball of rice soaked in lentils. Some days, Anaadi, all grown up and far from home, couldn’t bear to smile at all, in case the memories he carried with him would come tumbling out in a spate of angry syllables and spit.
* * *
When Anaadi’s eldest sister came back to her family to have her third baby, a woman with a husky voice and a square jaw came by the house. She wore a sari, so she must have been a woman – but Anaadi was not sure. Anaadi had seen her dance at births and weddings. She lived in a nearby town now, but still visited Panapukur now and then. She took Anaadi aside and told him that the headman had prayer beads and a birth chart. Both belonged to Anaadi. The sooner Anaadi saw those beads, the better. He needed to hold his birth chart – and his destiny – in the palm of his hand.
Anaadi walked up to the headman and asked him to show him his rosary and his horoscope.
“I cannot do it without asking his permission.”
“Whose permission?”
“The astrologer who gave them to me.”
“Then ask him.”
“He is dead.”
“Yes, but you are alive.”
The man stroked his beard and hesitated. Anaadi’s smile was guileless. The headman’s face softened, and he went inside. Anaadi followed him and saw him feel under his mattress. He took out a little bag with a drawstring.
The beads were pretty, but the horoscope hieroglyphics were indecipherable. The headman had something else scribbled on a scrap of paper. It was with him because secrets were safe with him, for he could not read. Anaadi grabbed at it excitedly. Unlike others around him, he had learnt to read and write in Bengali. But he could not tell what it said, either. It was in English!
“Can I keep them with me?”
“They are yours. I have no use for it. But you are still a boy still living under your father’s roof. You can have it later.”
The next year, Anaadi went back to the headman. He smiled, and the headman smiled back.
The headman pointed to all his fingers and his toes.
“How many do you have?”
“Twenty.”
“Come back when you are that many years old. Then it will be yours. Have patience.”
Anaadi knew he had to find out the truth sooner. He could not wait that long.
He walked out of the headman’s house to see three figures in the distance. They were his older sisters. They had seen him talking to the headman. Kumkum, the eldest of Anaadi’s three unmarried sisters, looked worried. Kumkum always gave Anaadi an extra helping of fish belly in curry and kept only the bony fish head for herself. She was as pretty as she was prudent, and liked by everyone. Her mother relied on her as she was deft with the household budget. There were some good matches coming in for her.
Why go looking for happiness elsewhere, she asked. Truth did not always bring happiness. As the first boy in the family after seven girls, he was his parents’ pride and joy. Wasn’t that enough?
Everyone knew that daughters were a curse – they left for their bridal home in their teens, taking fat dowries with them. Sons, on the other hand, did not leave their families after they got married. They looked after the land, produced grandsons. Everyone grew fat from the money and gifts from their new in-laws. Sons were cherished. And an only son? That was the happiest fate in the world.
But Anaadi knew that having no other brothers placed a burden on him that lay like a heavy fist across his heart. When his mother coughed by the smoking coal oven and looked up at him fondly, he felt the full force of her hopes, and had to turn away.
He looked beyond the hills and thought of other lives, other horizons.
His three eldest sisters had hard-working husbands and plump babies. The fourth had been married off recently with a heavy dowry that had left Anaadi’s father deep in debt. The villagers said Kumkum, the fifth, needed to be married off while she was still in her teens, or it would be too late. The clock was ticking. Her younger sisters would never get married off as long as she was still single.
The moneylender’s visits increased. Anaadi’s father’s forehead was furrowed like the fields he ploughed. A single unmarried girl in the house is as bad as having an unemployed son, but seven was a calamity. The married ones were too busy with their new families to help the three that were left behind.
A matchmaker came by along with a marriage proposal for Kumkum from a widower from the adjoining district. She could tell that a girl as sweet-natured and hard-wearing as Kumkum could help look after his children. In exchange, he would make no dowry demands and would help with the thatching – maybe even buy a bullock or two.
That wrinkled man? Anaadi snorted under his breath. But his parents looked relieved. The money not spent on Kumkum would improve her younger sisters’ chances. They looked at their young daughter anxiously. She could take some time to consider his proposal, they said cautiously. It was up to her, really.
Kumkum thought of the frail man’s head that shook slightly, then looked at her parents’ anxious faces. Yes, she said, she would consider it. But she would need a few months to decide.
The neighbors applauded. A worthy response from a girl named Kumkum, after the auspicious vermilion that a newly married woman wears in her hair parting. Such a boon to her overworked parents! Her parents gazing expectantly at her like she was a cloud bearing rumors of life-giving rain.
As each day passed, Kumkum’s eyes took on the haunted look of someone shaken awake from a happy dream.
* * *
Anaadi yearned to step outside his cozy community with its cluster of huts, coconut trees, and paddy. Actors and acrobats carried news from far away. They spoke of wondrous places as many miles away as there were stars in the sky, with people as countless as the hairs on his head. Chhau dancers came and danced up and down with fake swords, shaking their enormous head dresses. It was hard to tell who they were behind their masks and shadows.
Anaadi winnowed the wheat, carried sacks on his back, and made crooked wheels straight. But when the monkey charmers came on, he left his work and joined them. He grinned from ear to ear as he shook the dumaru drum and cobbled up custom.
Bapuram Bahurupee, a master of disguise like other Bahurupees, spoke of men in far away places who did not live under thatched roofs, who never ate rice or fish, who covered their bare feet with cow-hide when they walked on the baking earth. Khyapa Baul, a philosopher-singer like most Bauls, agreed. People were different everywhere. Some spent entire lives without seeing a tiger or a snake. Why, some even worshiped other gods.
No one took traveling players like Bapuram Bahurupee and Khyapa Baul seriously. The men slapped each others’ backs. Tears of laughter streamed from their eyes. Oh, that Khyapa was always such a liar when he drank. And that Bapuram was a dear man, but his tall tales were something else. Houses with roofs that were not thatched? No snakes and tigers? Different gods? Whatever next!
But Anaadi’s eyes grew round as coins. He was seized with wanderlust.
He looked at Bahurupee, starstruck. He pleaded with him to cover his face with paint. When Khyapa Baul’s mystic songs spoke about the human condition, Anaadi took sneaky puffs on his clay chillum.
A month later, Bahurupee left on his rusty cycle. Anaadi ran after him as far as his legs could take him. Then he went home and curled up in his bed and would not stir for days.
* * *
Anaadi was growing into a winsome young man.
One day, he saw a girl working knee-deep in wet paddy. She wooed him with three songs, and he was easily won. He told her of his dreams of seeing the world. She appeared to agree with everything he said. He met her the next day and the next week. He wanted to talk to her of travel, but she needed help with the fields. Then when that was done, she wanted to tickle him and press against him, all limp with love. She begged him till he blushed and they sank giggling in the mud.
As he moved tenderly over her, he thought of Bapuram Bahurupee’s body. The paddy lay forgotten around them.
Some months later, the girl told him he needed to hurry up and marry her. As she grew big with child, his heart grew small with dashed dreams. He asked her to run away with him. Wasn’t that the plan? They could travel from place to place. What, with their baby on their backs?, she snorted and shushed him. She ordered him to go to her house and ask her father for her hand. But he knew her father would tell him to work those paddy fields for the rest of his life.
Babies could be looked after by grandparents, too. Would she come see the world with him? She furiously picked up some mud and threw it at him till it caked his face. She told him he was good for nothing. She refused to live with a daydreamer.
She married someone from another village a month later, before people could feel her stomach and map her shame. Her husband was a man who liked to plough, and she liked feet that stuck in the mud.
Anaadi pretended to smile and wave as she rode off into her new life in an ox cart that grew smaller and smaller into the sunset. Inside, he wept for her and for Bahurupee and for everyone who had left him behind. Kumkum silently hugged him tight.
* * *
A jatra theater troupe came to town and set up tents for months. He watched them enact their scenes. Every day, he asked if he could join them. Finally, they said yes. He let the actors slather paint on his face, put a woman’s wig on his head, and wrap him in a sari. He stood trembling on stage though he did not have any lines.
No one else could tell it was him. He could be anyone! For the first time in his life, he felt free.
A few weeks later, when the actors needed someone to play Queen Kaikeyi’s hunchbacked evil maid, Manthara, from the ancient epic, Ramayana, his smile grew wider. All day, while his father was away in the fields, he practiced being Manthara, whispering to Kaikeyi, plotting to wrest the kingdom of Ayodhya from Rama so that Rama’s half brother Bharat, Kaikeyi’s son, could sit on the throne. They picked him for the minor role. At night, he recited her lines on a wooden stage before the whole village – lines that would get Rama, the legitimate king to be, exiled to the forest.
His father left the house, pointing to all the chopped wood that Anaadi was expected to cart to the market, and then pointed to the hole in the roof that needed urgent thatching. Anaadi had grown sick of working all year long. He ran to the clearing outside the town where tents had been set up. He acted, he sang, he danced. He knew his sister Kumkum would cover for him.
He made friends, in particular, with a young man with a soft face and firm body who reddened every time he looked at him.
Every night, after everyone was asleep, he went home and removed his makeup and his wig. His mother and youngest sisters were usually asleep. His father was out drinking. Kumkum could not bear to have dinner without Anaadi. She would wait up for him so she could give him the last of the fish in the house, hiding her own empty plate with her sari’s edge.
One evening, his father came to see the jatra. Anaadi, who was saying his lines in a falsetto, froze. But his father did not recognize him in his woman’s clothes. When everyone clapped at the end, so did his father. Anaadi’s eyes sparkled.
On the thirteenth week, when the play wound up, he came home full of excitement only to find Kumkum crying quietly. The rain had poured through the roof of their little granary and rotted all the chopped wood and harvested grain inside.
Her mother had said nothing to her, but her unhappy eyes had done all the talking. If Kumkum had only said yes to the man who had offered help with the thatching, none of this would have happened.
Anaadi tried to cheer her up by reciting a few lines from the show. He flicked his wig and walked in a mincing gait and put his finger to his cheek. He told her his secret – he wanted to leave all this and be a traveling entertainer all his life. He would be famous. He would take her along with him. Kumkum tried to look happy for him as he chattered away.
As Anaadi began removing his makeup, he saw his father’s shocked face in the mirror.
He turned around. His father, his hair wet from trying to save the granary, was standing by the door. Anaadi’s smile froze, and the rag fell from his hand.
Fatikchand had never lifted a finger on anyone before, but tonight was different. He picked up a switch that his son had made. Anaadi stiffened his back and bit back a scream. Flick! For teasing his sisters and not doing his share of the housework. Flick! For always filling up their heads with ceaseless talk of travel. Flick! For shaming the family name forever by playing a woman in public. Flick! For the unthatched roof. Flick! For letting the wood warp and the grain rot.
Anaadi feinted and grabbed the switch from his father’s tired hands, hoping against hope that his frustrated frown would ease into his usual answering smile.
It did not.
Instead, Fatikchand threw down his switch in disgust and stared at his son as if he was seeing him for what he was for the very first time. His hands and legs were shaking as though he had been hitting himself and not his son.
Anaadi’s mother had woken up in all the commotion. She led Fatikchand away by his hand. Anaadi tried to follow them. She shook her head at him.
Kumkum rubbed salve on her brother’s welts. She kissed him on the forehead. “Baba works all day in the fields. We’ll be the death of him. What is to become of us?”
Anaadi got up and crept up to where Fatikchand lay on the pallet outside under the stars. Surely his father already regretted what had happened and was dying to hug him?
Fatikchand’s food lay untouched beside him. His old face twisted in disappointment, he turned to his wife and said, “Our Anaadi is not the extra pair of hands we had hoped for. He is just an extra mouth to feed.”
His wife sobbed, “We loved him as our own, but he was never ours to keep. Maybe a foundling doesn’t belong anywhere.”
* * *
A foundling! Anaadi could not sleep all night. He got up and tied his sisters’ braids together for one last time. Kumkum sighed in her sleep and reached for his hand, but did not wake up. He knew he would miss her the most. One day, he would come back and take her with him – if he dared.
Before the sun rose, he went into the headman’s house. Quietly, he took the beads and the horoscope and the piece of paper from under the man’s mattress as he slept. He knew his destiny was in that birth chart.
By the time the cocks began to crow, he had found the jatra troupe, their tents all folded, their costumes packed. He left with them for their next show.
He traveled from place to place after that, often playing the part of Krishna, the cowherd with the flute who stole butter from the churn, stole farm girls’ clothes as they splashed water at him, and went on to defeat demons and uncover the secrets of the world.
Everybody remembered the day Anaadi left his village for good. It was the day, they said years later, that there was simply no smile to be seen for miles and miles of mud for months on end.
Nandini Lal is a writer based in the Washington D.C. area.
