The Five-dollar Smile Fourteen Early Stories and a Farce in Two Acts

In the title story - written in a lonely hotel room in Geneva soon after the author began his work with the United Nations - a young Indian orphan is on his way to visit America for the first time, and his anguish and longings in the airplane seem hardly different from those of any American child. Tharoor's admiration for P.G. Wodehouse makes "How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink" a delightful act of homage, while "The Temple Thief," "The Simple Man," and "The Political Murder" bring to mind O'Henry and Maupassant. His three college stories, "Friends," "The Pyre," and "The Professor's Daughter," are full of youthful high jinks, naive infatuations, and ingenious wordplay, and "The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer" explores a writer's conflicted relationship with his psychiatrist and his work in the manner of Woody Allen.