Lafir and the Captive Smiler

Chapter Three of The Thousand Faces of the Smiling Buddha

Lafir's aggressively trimmed mustache, disturbingly Hitler-esque in its brevity, is the center of gravity of his compact features. A half-smile serves to lighten, by a delicate degree, the stern impression created by his comportment, and yet it is hard to imagine him ever surrendering to the recklessness of a belly laugh. His spotless silk shirt, wrinkle-free pants, and polished black dress shoes, suggest a commitment to personal hygiene that borders on the obsessive.

My stubble-studded face, Holi-stained Dandi March t-shirt, sun-bleached shorts, and decomposing flip flops, present me as the visual antithesis to Lafir's fastidiousness. With the better part of a foot differentiating us in height, we make an odd couple.

We collect my luggage from the guest house where I had stayed briefly in the wee hours of the morning and then Lafir proceeds to his home in the outskirts of Colombo to assemble his wardrobe for our road trip. While I wait in Lafir's impeccably-maintained Ford Taurus station wagon, I become transfixed on a mangy dog that cannot stop scratching her shoulder with her hind leg. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch. There is almost nothing left of her skinless, infected shoulder and yet she cannot resist the urge to continue scratching. Scratch, scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch. I scan my person for any food items I can offer the haggard canine, but come up empty. I coo sympathetically from the car window and the dog looks up at me, momentarily freed from her self-destructive imperative. Do dog smiles count? I open the door to approach the miserable creature, but she has been too conditioned by ill-intentioned humans to stick around and scrambles desperately to her feet before limping pathetically down the road and out of sight. (Perverse poetasters note: the itchy bitch had a glitch in her hitch.) Three mischievous schoolboys round the corner and for the dog's sake I am thankful she has vacated the scene. The eldest of the boys, upon seeing me, makes a face and mockingly starts blathering with a faux accent to the delight of his mates. I smile at him and he responds with a sneer, but his companions smile. Two outta three ain't bad, I figure.

The smile project is little more than an hour old and I have already had my first epiphany. My drive to elicit smiles is short circuiting the judgmental mind to some degree. Under normal circumstances I probably would have returned fire at the trio's ringleader – jabbered back at him with an equally ridiculous accent or feigned getting out of the car to give chase. But the imperative to smile has created a distance from my reactive self. Once a smile has been issued it's too difficult to return to an inimical or defensive posture. The brief gap created by smiling has withdrawn power from my emotional computer. In the flash flood precipitated by conscious volition, weedy passions are are swept away before they are able to find purchase. I actually am able (or so I imagine) to sense the fearful burden of the boy's pantomime and realize it is blocking him from truly carefree interaction with others. Where I might normally have felt indignation, I am discovering fledgling pangs of compassion.

Lafir returns to the car with one large suitcase in tow and anxiously taking drags from the cigarette suspended at the corner of his mouth.

"I not smoke in car," Lafir assures me, smiting the half-spent John Player Gold Leaf underfoot. "Make bad air and hard to breathe."

"It's really hard to give up though, isn't it?"

"Not possible," he smiles. "She is bad love, but not possible for leaving alone."

As Sri Lanka is Lafir's gig, I leave our destination and itinerary in his hands with the caveat that he take me to well-peopled places. He decides quickly on Sigiriya, which I misunderstand to be another comment on his smoking, but he ensures me is a destination of "too many people." En route, I am soon disheartened to discover that he is only minimally under my direction. The first time I see a large gathering of people at a roadside stand (a perfect opportunity for more smiles) I ask Lafir to pull over, but he drives on with nary a hint of hesitation on the accelerator.

"Nothing to see there," Lafir explains, "This kind of people will just make trouble for you. You know, you strange guy so crowd will come. Just asking too many questions and you are not liking it. Not clean people."

"But I like meeting people like this. I am liking it."

Lafir, with an implacable grimace commanding the lower half of his facial anatomy, ignores my feeble protest and continues apace. Daylight is fast giving way to the murky tones of evening and I have become a hostage in the car I hired. I smile frantically at intersections hoping to make eye contact with pedestrians, but the few that notice me just assume I have a screw loose and quickly divert their gaze. On and on we drive – past sharply inclined embankments with oddly-bent palm trees, past cloud-shrouded super hills, past rail-thin, long-skirted women, past boys fecklessly careening on ancient bicycles – ever deeper into Tarzanesque jungle.

"Jungle," Lafir comments, with irregular application of the accelerator lest I entertain any foolish mission-interrupting notions of escape from my mobile prison. Pleas to purchase bottled water and relieve myself go unheeded. His response is undeviating. "You are not liking it here. Too dirty. Waiting until hotel come. Almost here." I threaten to wet myself in the car, but it only elicits a barely-audible chortle from Lafir, and he drives on. The sadistic tease is to last another ninety minutes.

The hotel where I am finally allowed to disembark caters to newlyweds, but as it is off-season the proprietors are only too happy to host a motley-attired single with bursting bladder. I'm checked into a gaudy suite of varnished browns and intense pinks. I immediately make a beeline for the toilet where I cast my gaze skyward and sigh with relief as evacuation is initiated. My joy is short lived as the urine stream bifurcates and is redirected from the bowl to my leg and the tiled floor. A frantic attempt at realignment only exacerbates my pathetic condition such that my shorts and dry leg are amply watered.

After washing, changing clothes, and mopping my ill-aimed effluent from the bathroom floor, I return to the bedroom and cautiously lift the pink mosquito net of the canopied bed to collapse on an even pinker blanket and rest my head on the pinkest-of-pink heart-shaped pillows. I look around at the walls which are adorned with vaguely sexual renderings of Buddhist demigoddesses and feel like an involuntary Liberace in a giant gut of Pepto Bismol-medicated indigestion. With the smile project in shambles and imagining myself to be a captive of hard-driving Lafir, I am tempted to curl up in a sickly pink swirl of forgetfulness. But I have smiles to go before I sleep. Smiles to go before I sleep.

I summon the will power to pull myself from the bed and to make the rounds of the hotel grounds in the hopes of chalking up a few more grin wins. The smiles I offer up belie my anti-social and exhausted state. Between the handful of guests and staff, I harvest another 14 smiles and finish the day with 39 unique hits. The modest victory momentarily spells my flagging spirit, but only a half day into the project and I'm woefully off the required pace to reach one thousand. One thousand? What was I thinking?