Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

What was important to him was that Duleep Smile became a star, a celebrity chef avant la lettre, beloved by women in particular, especially as he stated publicly that his food improved the looks and attractiveness of the women who ate it, even suggesting that curries had aphrodisiac qualities. The opinion of the English wife regarding his womanizing ways is not recorded. However, at an unspecified date, she decamped, which may serve as the clearest expression of her feelings; whereupon Chef Smile married and left a succession of ever more youthful American ladies. He also began to call himself a prince. Prince Duleep Smile, the Emir of Balochistan’s fourth son. (He wasn’t.) He claimed to have a degree from Cambridge University (he didn’t), and said he was a friend of King Edward VII. (Amazingly, this part of his fantasy of himself had some truth to it; the king agreed to be his patron for a brief time, at least until he discovered that Duleep Smile’s other claims were phony.) But the chef’s golden era—only a few years long—was ending. His troubles with the law were just getting started.

After his citizenship application was rejected he returned to England and then came back to America accompanied by a mysteriously large entourage. There was a law in America making it a crime carrying a thousand-dollar penalty to give anyone a pretext for immigrating by offering them a job. Duleep Smile had made such offers to twenty-six people. He claimed he hadn’t. His large entourage was composed of mere tourists, he said; tourists and friends. The authorities didn’t buy it. Sherry’s restaurant, facing a fine of twenty-six thousand dollars (seven hundred thousand dollars in today’s money), ended its association with Chef Smile, who entered a long decline and eventually left for India with his last American wife and disappeared from history. If he left children behind in America, their names are not recorded.

This story was not known to the Indians of Atlanta for a long time. The version they were given by Dr. Smile, and which everyone accepted unquestioningly, was heavily doctored. The culinary triumphs were described; the lies, deceptions, and hustles were left undescribed. Only after everything that happened had happened did an enterprising researcher exhume the true story of Duleep Smile, and establish that no line of descent from the famous chef to the pharma billionaire could satisfactorily be established. Once again, his fellow Atlantan Indians were left to shake their heads at their own willingness to be deceived. “Not only did he choose to claim descent from a con man, but that claim itself was a con,” the Indian newspaper wrote. “This was the level of the man’s audacity: he showed himself to us openly, but blinded us with his charm. So he rose high high. But he has fallen now.”

IN RECENT TIMES HIS WIFE had raised his profile higher than ever. His sons had left home and gone to college to study useful things, money and machines, but their mother, Mrs. Happy Smile, was a lover of the arts, and now that she had an empty nest she insisted to her husband that they should become involved in that world, even though he thought of the arts as useless and the people involved in the arts as useless people. At first he rebuffed her desire to set up a family arts sponsorship foundation, but she persisted, and when she found out about the extensive involvement of the OxyContin family in this kind of work she saw her opening, correctly guessing that her husband’s competitive spirit would be aroused. In the garden of the Peachtree Battle Avenue house, by the rhododendron bush, and over a mint julep at the end of the working day, she confronted him. “We must give back, isn’t it,” she began. “That is the right thing to do.” He frowned, which showed her this was not going to be easy. But she set her jaw firmly and frowned back.

“Give back what?” he asked. “What have we taken that we must return?”

“Not that way,” she said, in her most cajoling voice. “I mean only, give back out of our generosity to society in thanks for the so so many blessings we have received.”

“Society gave me no blessings,” he said. “What I have received, I have earned by the sweat of my brow.”

“OxyContin khandaan, they give back plenty,” she said, playing her ace. “Their family name is so so respected. You don’t want your name to be so so respected also?”

“What are you talking about?” he said, sounding interested now.

“So so many wings they have,” she said. “Metropolitan Museum wing named after them, Louvre wing also, London Royal Academy wing also. A bird with so so many wings can fly so so high.”

“But we are not birds. We have no need of wings.”

“At the Tate Modern they have an escalator with their name. At the Jewish Museum in Berlin they have a staircase. They have a rose also, pink, bearing their name. They have a star in the sky. So so many things they have.”

“Why must I care about asteroids and escalators?”

She knew what to say. “Branding,” she cried. “You buy naming rights, your name becomes loved. It will be so so loved. And love is good for business, no? So so good.”

“Yes,” he said. “Love is good for business.”

“So then. We must give back, isn’t it.”

“You’ve been looking into this,” he guessed, correctly. She blushed and beamed.

“Opera, art gallery, university, hospital,” she said, clapping her hands. “All will be so so happy and your name will be so so big. Collecting art also is good. Indian art is hot just now, like Chinese, but we must support our own people, isn’t it. Prices are rocketing, so investment potential is good. We have so much wall space. Also we can put pictures on permanent loan in best museums, and your name will be so so loved. Let me do this for you. Also,” she said, clinching the argument, “art world ladies are so so beautiful. This is all I’m saying.”

He loved his wife. “Okay,” he said. “Smile wing, Smile extension, Smile gallery, Smile balcony, Smile ward, Smile elevator, Smile toilet, Smile star in the sky.”

She broke into song. “When you’re smiling,” she sang. It was their song. “When you’re smiling.”

“The whole world smiles with you,” he said.

VERY WELL. IT IS TIME to reveal certain secrets closely guarded by Dr. R. K. Smile and the upper-echelon executives of Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc. (SPI, everyone pronounced it “Spy”). These secrets have to do primarily with the hidden life of the enterprise’s premier product, InSmile™, the sublingual fentanyl spray that made the company’s fortune; although they also involve the rest of the opioid products manufactured at the main SPI facility in Alpharetta, Georgia (pop. 63,038). It will not be a pretty story. After all, here was a man at the very peak of his career, a generous man, widely respected and even beginning to be loved. It is never pleasant to tear down such a personage, to reveal the feet of clay. Such exposés tarnish the whole community, and are regarded by many as washing the community’s dirty linen in public. But when a façade begins to crumble, it is only a matter of time before the unwashed linens tumble into public view anyway. By the time Dr. R. K. Smile visited his relative Quichotte to terminate their official relationship, SPI had already begun to attract the curiosity of the authorities, even though Dr. Smile was dismissive of their suspicions. Meanwhile, Mrs. Happy Smile had entered the arts donor sphere with high energy, and her donation offers had initiated positive discussions regarding naming rights to a potential new Smile Wing of the High Museum and a much-anticipated second-stage Smile Extension of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center; and it even, for a time, seemed possible that the city might agree to the renaming of Pemberton Place, the urban hub where the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium were located. “Give me five years,” she told her husband, “and I’ll make our name bigger in Atlanta than Coke.” And yet, and yet. Lightning can strike out of a clear sky. Dr. R. K. Smile would not have five years to give.