A step-by-step guide to smiling says: open mouth in an ‘O’. Next say ‘E’ and gently bare your upper row of teeth as much as you painlessly can. Now crinkle eyes, so they go Chinese. There, one small smile coming up.
Do you crave someone’s sweet, sweet smile everyday, or grin naughtily like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland?
Some novelists bemoan the smile ‘that doesn’t reach the eyes’ and some characters are said to have thin lips that go with ‘unsmiling eyes’. Many a heroine smiles ‘through her eyelashes’.
There is even the ‘ghost of a smile’, which is different from the smile of a ghost and far less spooky.
Amusement, maternal beams, a baby’s toothy hello, belly laughs, come-hither moues, condescending or heartwarming grins, Santa’s ho-ho, an ex-boyfriend’s smirk and sms smileys... Smiles are alternately insolent, nervous, grim, plastic, polite, drunken, lecherous, suave, dumb, dead-serious, apologetic, menacing, mischievous, infectious, anything.
There are even sorrowful smiles of sympathy you can flash at a funeral.
If alone in a lift, we smile into the mirror, all bashful and intimate. We quirk our mouths sideways with a quick slanted peek while flashing our pearly whites at reflections in changing rooms.
In the car mirror, there is the sideways mouth stretch to see if anything’s caught between the teeth. In the looking glass at home you widen lips nice and easy, soft and slow. In smile terms, this is a candlelight dinner for one.
The liftman charges in guiltily, you smile reassuringly. A creep overtakes your car, you smile nastily. The boss is recounting a joke, you ha-ha before the punch line.
Smiles replace sentences and hand gestures, take over ellipses, express subtler moods and the unsaid.
A step-by-step guide to smiling says: open mouth in an ‘O’. Next say ‘E’ and gently bare your upper row of teeth as much as you painlessly can. Now crinkle eyes, so they go Chinese. There, one small smile coming up.
The moderator’s dilemma when it comes to grinning is understandable. To reach that mark between ingratiating and super-intelligent is excruciating work.
At the Jaipur Lit-Fest, Vikram Seth’s good humour was contextual; after all, he was face to face with a large group of readers who absolutely adored him. But the jury is still out on the MC’s mirth who giggled over how he tried to pass off a poem by Seth as his own at 16 to try and sleep with a girl.
In modern psycho-babble about positivity begetting positivity, non-smilers are not frowned upon only because it goes against that very theory. If you grimace, they grin and bear it. Only surgery can eliminate their smile.
When in doubt, smile. Unless it is a lunatic asylum and your relatives have just brought you there. Fakes — with accompanying words like ‘how nice running into you in this deserted park where I’m to meet my boyfriend whom I shall now introduce as my cousin’ — are highly recommended in sticky situations.
Smiles are best when the lips are still attached at both ends and there is only a suggestion of saliva. But how much is too much? Smile and the whole world smiles with you, smile too long and you creep out a continent or two.
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