Between strangers, there's no better ice-breaker than a smile — a signal of a budding friendship. A smile can also help thaw a frosty relationship, disarm suspicion and neutralise enmity. A smile costs nothing, and some smiles are hard to forget — the cherubic smile of an infant, the winsome smile of a young lass or the radi-ant smile of a new bride. Spon-taneity marks a genuine smile as distinct from a simper.
American humorist Don Herold observed insightfully, "A lot of men think that if they smile for a second, somebody will take ad-vantage of them." Charles Monckton, a former British planter in Munnar, also apparently thought so. He managed the tea estate where my father worked, and was truly a sulker with a permanent scowl that put people off. He seldom smiled — and when he did, it seemed more like a leer. Scared, we kids always gave him a wide berth.
Years later I ran into morose Monckton in Munnar — having long retired, he was taking a trip down memory lane. Hesitantly I introduced myself and mentioned my father, who he remembered. Quite unexpectedly, his wizened face with its stiff upper lip creased into a lopsided grin as we exchanged pleasantries. It was indeed the first time I'd ever seen him show any semblance of a smile — which seemed as alien to him as an extraterrestrial!
Then in the 1950s there was our elderly school dentist, who perhaps had one of the most reassuring smiles for a pain-wracked patient. As his foot-operated drill penetrated an infect-ed tooth making one squirm and grimace, he would smile benignly, a gold-plated incisor lighting up his florid face. His dental treatment was seldom an ordeal.
There's also the enigmatic and dimpled smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Many have tried to puzzle out what it signi-fies. Frankly, to me she looks faint-ly amused rather than lovelorn as some suggest. Or maybe she's re-luctant to smile openly because of a missing tooth which could make her look hideous! Teeth, of course, can make or mar one's smile. At school in Tiruchi I recall we just couldn't resist the temptation to deface wall posters of beaming film stars and grinning politicians by deftly blacking out a couple of their ivories!
A spontaneous smile makes for a good photograph. Every year our school's victorious hockey team would be photographed with the warden and Mr. Tomlinson, the physical trainer. The photographer, with his unwieldy box-camera mounted on a tripod, would urge us to smile as he disappeared under a black cape behind the camera, only his prominent bow-legs showing. This in itself was mirth-provok-ing. But to ensure we grinned, Mr. Tomlinson would deadpan tartly, "Now, for heaven's sake, smile, and don't look as though you're facing a firing squad!"
I also recall attending a man-agement training course where, oddly enough, the habitually un-smiling and grave-faced instruc-tor counselled us that a smile spreads cheer and a scowl, fear. None, however, wanted to risk antagonising him by pointing out that he wasn't practising what he preached!
As one ages, wrinkles tend to erase one's smile, bringing to mind Mark Twain's observation, 'Wrinkles merely indicate where smiles have been." And can there be anything more charm-ing than the wrinkle-wreathed and sometimes toothless smile of a wizened elder?
gnettomunnar@rediff mail.corn
