THE WAY SHE SMILED..
Mini: Have you made her your girl friend?
Me: who??
Mini: the girl you showed me last time.
Me: “No, there is only one girl that I love."
And she turned her face over her left shoulder to match her
eye balls with mine which were leveled at least a foot above
hers and awarded me a jubilant smile which my heart
comprehended into an approval of my tacit proposal. There
was some abberration this time from the manner she used to
smile at my trying—to—be-funny jokes and towards boys so
as to lure them to maintain their attention on her and thus
raise her fame quotient with respect to other girls.
This smile on the other hand looked honest; it carried the message
which, I don’t know how, my eyes deciphered in no time. God
must’ve known the truth, but what my consciousness felt as
truth at that time was beyond any doubt. The smile lasted for
few seconds but those seconds apparently passed in several
minutes. She continued to walk beside me and remained
quiet, she was rarely outspoken but she always had
something to add to stir up the conversation when situation
became unusually quiet because of something critical that had
surfaced out of a useless crap, making the commentators
argue to themselves before choosing the next word or at all to
say it. I was, of course, quite too, still soaking the picture of
the most convincing smile from some unrelated to me as if
licking the remains of beer from the bottle which was
unwillingly emptied in one shot. But i had to respond to the
hesitant girl so i too showed her my yellow teeth as i did not
have anything better to offer in return. As usual she spoke up
before it could freeze between us. I went along with the
conversation but did not participate in it. However agreeing
she might be looking at the time of eluding her cheerfulness
through her smile but she did not say that, in fact she didn't
say anything in this regard. I was confident about the honesty
of that smile but not about the message or, say, her
acceptance of my unspoken proposal. She might have
delivered her best smile in good humor, she might well have
perceived my humble revelation as my attempt to flirt with
her and glowed in blush. Whatever occurred to me could just
be a biased conclusion of my vague contemplation. After all
she never ever had said anything on the basis of which I could
establish that she liked me. As I said earlier God knows the
truth. I on my part, to this day, believe that the honesty, the
purity, the strangeness,
the freshness of that smile could not
be questioned. The nuances that my eyes involuntarily picked
up in the way she raised her face up only to surrender, the
pleading hue of those stubborn eyes, deliberate looseness
rendered to those petal like lips, the visible attempt of
controlling the stretching out of cheeks within the limits of
feminine shame, somewhat unsynchronized facial expression
will remain conserved in my memories, no matter what the
matter was with that mysterious smile.
