On smoking (Part 591)

Last week, on a day scheduled like a highway pileup, I got home in the wee hours. My mother had returned from her holiday just moments before, and she opened the door for me with a big smile. My mother's smile can light up the far corners of a coalmine. I felt very sorry to have to do this.

"Hello!" she said, lighting up the far corners of a coalmine.

"I smoke again now!" I said, just lighting up.

Her face fell like a brick off a cliff. I felt really, really bad, but only for four seconds, because the weight of five weeks of guilt had simultaneously also just fallen away from me. Confession=absolution=liberation. After five weeks of tucking my obscene horns, hideous pointy tail and misshapen hump under hat, trousers and coat, I could finally just be me again, stop trying to fit amongst the normal, just walk tall and disgusting and free - a person with smelly flaws, yes; but a person who is okay with your stares of revulsion because she can focus on the important stuff, which is to remap the city - according to where the best paanwallahs are and how late they're open, because it's been nearly two years, and things change.

So yes, I have fallen off the wagon. I'm not proud of it, but I am enjoying it greatly. (Statutory warning: Smoking rots your mouth, gives you cancer, destroys your lungs, and makes your mommy sad.)

I blame the extreme abroadiness of my summer holiday: cool temperatures; lots of walking; feelings of invincibility and immortality, etc. For a while I only bummed smokes, but that's very bad manners when one cigarette costs Rs 17,943. So one day, walking alone and anonymous, I bought my own pack of ten. I felt positively dirty asking for it, as if I were trying to buy a child slave; but it was really easy to get over as I sat at an al fresco table with my book, glass of wine, and cigarette.

So I had smoked during my holiday, but it was when I returned to Delhi that everything really fell apart. The first thing I saw in my room was the book Reasons to Smoke that came out in 2007 when smoking bans began to kick in. I hadn't come across it in years, especially since it measures 3X3 inches - but the chaos of house painting, also known as God, had placed it on my desk. It's not a particularly funny book, but it did its evil work.

For a few days I bought one cigarette at a time. People walked up to me with their mouths making perfectly round "o"s, their eyes perfect twin "o"s above that. "But you quit smoking!" they said - I think, because what came out was "oooooooo". And I said, "I still don't smoke smoke, I'm just having some cigarettes."

But that line wore pretty thin when I bought a proper 20-pack of my old brand, and a lighter. In smoker terms, that's like calling up your old flame and getting engaged. Suddenly I was on my fourth packet, and other people who claimed to have quit were bumming cigarettes off me. Just as I could not fathom when I quit, why I ever smoked, now I cannot fathom why I ever quit. Just as the smell of smoke was so recently repellent, it is now a cuddly, comforting stench.

Standing at the bottom of the habit hill all over again, I'm aghast at how far I have to climb. It may take a while.

In my defence, though, I'd like to point out that Sisyphus never quit.
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com