Are Teeth The Most Important Things In Life?
Yes, yes and yes
He emigrated to the US when he was a teenager, when his teeth were already established. They were a product of Bombay, and its environs, its mores, its nourishment. He became my brother-in-law. A slender man with a silken skein of black hair.
When he smiles, his teeth are ice-white in his warm skin. Like a slice of ice, like diamond ice revealed as the warm Indian skin cleaves.
Abdul has a verbal tic. No matter what you say, he replies, ‘Is thet right?’ Thus validating and encouraging you, the talker, the speaker, the chatterer. He’s a flatterer that way, a charmer, a validator. And his teeth, his teeth, flash and shine and dazzle.
My mother, when she was a child in Ireland, used to clean her teeth with soot from the chimney. From her thirties, maybe even her twenties, before I even knew her, she lamented and worried over her teeth. Over their gappy form, their tea-tinged shade, their strange crooked angles, their fairy-fey form. It left her with the life-long affliction of the afflicted: an obsession, a passion, a preoccupation for what she did not possess: good teeth.
From her forties onwards, she began an ad hoc acquirement of false teeth, resulting in a full set by her fifties. A set that clacked into her mouth and sucked out of her…
