Ash and Smoke (short story) - Part 2
“… but for women like her—late thirties, wearing a chikan kurta, driving a Micra, teenage son alongside—buying cigarettes could create a little grenade of gossip [in Muzaffarnagar].”
Read Part 1 here.
On the Circular Road, as they neared Easy Day, she grew tense about finding a parking spot. Luckily, a Creta with an orange Hanuman decal on its rear window started pulling out just as they approached. She waited, then nosed the Micra into the freed-up space.
‘This Hanuman’s so angry,’ she said under her breath.
‘My friend Suraj… he’s got this tattooed on his arm,’ Varun said. ‘Looks super cool.’
‘Don’t even think of it.’
‘Can I stay in the car?’ Varun asked. ‘Keep the AC on. And buy me a 2-litre Coke for sure.’
‘Why did you come if you wanted to stay in the car?’
‘We will go to Gol Market also, right? That’s where I want to go.’
‘I’m not buying you a video game.’
‘It’s a pirated copy, yaar. Not expensive at all.’
‘Don’t call me yaar.’
The social-distancing efforts at Easy Day were a comedy. The staff’s masks dropped often as they tried to upsell to customers or even when they spoke to each other. There was a crowd at the only operational billing counter, four people filling the space between any two circles drawn on the floor. But this was still the best Muzaffarnagar had to offer in the name of a supermarket. She dropped items into the cart as she navigated its five short lanes. Everything was in its usual place, but no cigarettes were on display anywhere. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen cigarettes here.
At the billing counter, she asked the short man with the pockmarked face about Classic cigarettes. He paused his scanning and looked up at her. Then he pulled his mask down and said: ‘We don’t sell cigarettes at Easy Day, madam.’
She nodded, knowing well that the man had pulled his mask down to show her the full play of mirth on his face. Her own face was hidden behind a mask, but the man’s gesture had felt to her like a disrobing of sorts. She ignored the request for her phone number for the loyalty points and paid with her card. Then, she pushed the cart towards the store’s automatic sliding door.
‘There is a paanwaala across the road, madam,’ the man shouted behind her. He was smiling again with his mask pulled down. The men in the queue were all looking at her.
Outside, after stuffing the bags in the car’s boot, she glanced at the paan shop before taking to the driver’s seat.
‘Did you bring Coke?’ Varun asked without looking up from the phone.
If she got out of the car and walked across the road and bought the cigarette packets, it wouldn’t be the end of the world—of course it wouldn’t be. But it would be a thing worth remembering and retelling for anyone who saw her. Unless accompanied by men, women didn’t go to paan shops in Muzaffarnagar. And even then, one could imagine such a jaunt only for a post-dinner sweet paan at best. Perhaps women from a different class—labourers—or older women could buy beedis or tobacco, but for women like her—late thirties, wearing a chikan kurta, driving a Micra, teenage son alongside—buying cigarettes could create a little grenade of gossip. चौदह वर्षीय सुपुत्र की माँ ने लिए सिगरेट के डब्बे - ज़िले में फेफड़ों का बुरा हाल ज़ारी (Mother of fourteen-year-old son buys three cigarette packets as lungs continue to be ravaged across the district)—she could imagine this as a headline in the evening Muzaffarnagar Bulletin. Even as she was amused at her imagination, she very well knew that such a thing wasn’t out of the territory of the possible in this city.
If a teenage boy bought the cigarette packets, however, it wouldn’t be worth any gossip. It would be the most natural thing in the world, the kind of thing that is unsavoury but happens all the time.
‘Should we go home now?’ she asked the teenage boy in her car.
‘Why? Aren’t we going to Gol Market? I want to have some falooda too.’
‘I’m not buying you any games.’
‘But you promised,’ he said with a whine.
‘I carried all the bags from over there to here,’ she said. ‘When we leave the house, you don’t even remember to lock the door. You don’t help with anything, Varun. And then you have all these demands… demands that you make without even looking up from the phone.’
He looked up from the phone to gauge how serious things were. Then he put his phone aside. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘You should try and help with some things na, beta. You’re almost a grown-up now.’
‘Okay, I will do as you say,’ he said, ‘now let’s go to Gol Market.’
She reversed the car out of the parking space and slowly took a U-turn on the two-lane road. She crossed the paan shop and then, twenty meters ahead, stopped the car at the mouth of a side street. ‘Dhaka Uncle asked me to buy him some cigarettes,’ she said. ‘Get three packs of Classic from that shop behind us.’ She handed Varun a five-hundred-rupee note.
He looked at the note and then at his mother, his face a diagram of confusion.
‘What? He was in the army. Must be an old habit.’
‘This won’t be enough,’ the boy said.
‘What won’t be enough?’
‘The money.’
It threw her off. ‘How do you know?’ she asked, aghast.
‘My… my Maths tuition sir,’ Varun said, ‘One day he was talking about how expensive cigarettes were, how much money the government makes off them. He smokes all the time.’
‘Ok, so how much?’ she asked.
‘Give me two more notes,’ he said, ‘I think that should do.’
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Actually… don’t ask him how much a packet is. That doesn’t send the right signal. Just buy all you can for fifteen hundred. Understood?’
"Will we go to the Gol Market after this?’
‘Yes, yes we will.’
In Gol Market they discovered that Varun’s game vendor had shut shop. Madhu let her son convince her about going to the New Mandi area in the search of an alternative. They first did some shopping in Gol Market, however, and, despite the risks, had a late lunch of dosas at Sangam followed by falooda kulfi at a stall. The market wasn’t bustling like it would in normal times, but the honking from the Shiv Chowk area wasn’t too far from the ceaseless din Madhu recalled from time before Covid. The sounds soothed her.
In New Mandi, she allowed Varun not one game but two. They returned home around 4 p.m., and the boy jumped at the TV to try out his new stuff.
Madhu decided to wait a day before she went over to Uncle’s house. He had unthinkingly given her a very difficult task, and even though she had accepted it just as unthinkingly, it seemed only proper to her that he wait an extra day before gratifying himself. Those things kill, at any rate; better tomorrow than today.
But her resolve weakened around 5:30 p.m., with Varun still immersed in the game and the outside light changing shade. She ordered the boy, in her sternest manner, to stop with the game and get to his studies, and then she stepped out clutching the bags carrying Uncle’s supplies, including the five packs of Classic Milds that fifteen hundred rupees had bought.
Entering Uncle’s house she noticed the unruly bougainvillaea again. She placed the bags on the takht, picked up the big rusty shears from behind the takht’s far leg, and carried the sturdier of the two chairs to the corner of the gate. There she mounted the chair, feeling a tad silly, hoping Kusum wouldn’t see her, and started clipping the wayward shoots and branches.
When she looked back ten minutes later, she found Uncle sitting on the other chair on the porch. He was still wearing the green checkered shirt.
‘Thank you, beti, thank you,’ he said to her with a smile. ‘Don’t worry about what’s on the ground… I’ll clean it up later.’
She carried the chair back to its earlier position, dusted it with an old cloth placed on the table’s lower level, and sat down on it. She put on her mask, then removed it. Uncle hadn’t opened the bags.
‘This one has what you’d asked for,’ she said. ‘Five packs.’
‘Of twenty?’
‘I think so.’
He opened the bag and checked inside. A new expression, something childlike in it, came over his face. Seeing it made her giggle, though in the very next moment she felt a pinprick of sadness, the same one she would feel watching Varun’s face when she bought him a game: it had been too long since she’s felt a joy like this.
‘Let’s have chai?’ Uncle asked, smelling a pack of cigarettes and only a little short of rolling his eyes in pleasure. ‘I should make good chai for you, at least.’
Madhu followed Uncle into the house and then into the kitchen. As he put a pan on the flame and got milk from the fridge, he talked about his heyday, the 1971 war: he was called ‘Dhaka in Dhaka’, he wrote to his wife every day, he lost a dear friend to typhoid there, a bullet once whizzed past his ear and was later revealed to be friendly fire… He had already told Madhu snatches of these tales, but today he added to them the revelation that it was during the war that he had taken to cigarettes in a big way. ‘War is these bursts of unendurable excitement between large periods of unendurable boredom,’ he said. ‘Everyone around me was smoking a lot.’ At some point during his narration, he had opened a pack and pinched out a single cigarette from it. There was no matchbox to light the cigarette with, and so he used the gas’s flame for his purposes after briefly pulling the pan away. Madhu found the manoeuvre practiced, practical, and somewhat dashing, especially as Uncle sucked in his cheeks momentarily for the first draw.
‘Are you really going to smoke in the kitchen?’
‘Oh, sorry, do you mind?’
‘No, why would I?’
Holding their cups, they sat in the low chairs in the drawing room and Uncle lit a second cigarette from the embers of the first one. When he caught Madhu looking at him, he smiled sheepishly. ‘It’s been a while,’ he said, then got up to pull out an ashtray from an old glass-fronted cabinet that stood on a side.
‘Does it help?’ Madhu asked as he sat back in the chair and placed the ashtray on the table between them. ‘With those… unendurable things? With boredom?’
Uncle nodded, but then said something contradictory to nodding. ‘It doesn’t help with anything other than itself.’
‘Then?’
‘It becomes a way to take a break from everything,’ he said and took a puff. ‘From boredom, from stress, from whatever you need a break from.’
‘From loneliness?’
He looked at her smilingly and said: ‘It’s good in company. You are here, so it’s good.’
Madhu took a sip of the chai, glad that Uncle had held the insinuation of loneliness to his, not hers. The cigarette smoke was sharp, strong. When she was a child it would nauseate her. People would smoke beedis on buses and her perturbed mother would request them to put the thing out on account of her suffering children. The suffering now was non-existent for her, and whatever mild discomfort she felt on account of the smoke was subsumed by the uniqueness of the situation, and by Uncle’s manner, which was vastly different today, with no sign of his usual desultoriness and an alert swiftness in all minute actions. She had seen him as a lonely old man whose grace and dignity had come to require some assistance to be sustainable. Today, she saw him in a fuller way, as an old man who had been young, who had once had a lot of company, a lot of animation, a lot of life. He needed nothing more to happen now, only to perform gestures that took him back and helped trace full images from the shadows; surely, apart from being a habit, the cigarettes were just such a gesture. It won’t be like this for her, she sensed. Her life—her unlived life—would make poor fodder for reminiscence.
‘Have you ever tried it?’ asked Uncle.
The question had emerged, perhaps, from how her gaze had unthinkingly fixed onto the curl of bluish smoke from the cigarette’s tip. She checked it, looked at Uncle, and said ‘No.’
‘Would you want to?’
‘No, I…’
‘It’s difficult as a woman, I know,’ said Uncle, pulling in the last drag from his second one. ‘And in a town like this one.’
‘In a town like this one?’
‘You know what I’m saying.’
‘Yes. Ah, yes.’
‘But if you want to try a new thing… you can be sure Dhaka Uncle can keep a secret.’
Madhu didn’t know what to say. Actually, she didn’t mind trying. And this realisation quickened her heartbeat in an instant. But to light a new one they would now have to go back to the kitchen and use the spark-lighter on gas. Uncle had just put out his second in the ashtray.
‘I’ll light you one,’ Uncle said and stood up.
Madhu wondered if her face was that easily readable. ‘Next time I’ll buy you a matchbox,’ she said while following Uncle to the kitchen. There was a lightness, even a tingle, in her chest and belly. Her mind went to flashes and sensations from a two-week period in Dehradun, in which she, a sixteen year old, had clandestinely gone to a park several times to hold the hand of a boy from school, who, tormented by first love, would wait hours for just ten fleeting minutes with her.
The smoke struck her throat viciously the first time. She coughed; her eyes watered. Uncle gave out a patrician laugh and asked her if she wanted to try again. She tasted the second pull fully—bitter, burnt—and was able to inhale some of it, only to again enter a bout of coughing. There was something boggy in the aftertaste, something that assailed both her brain and her tummy and made her feel a spike of nausea. But her pride had been tingled too, and to try again until the thing became as smooth as possible, until her constitution accepted poison as necessity, seemed terribly important.
The fifth puff was smooth: only the tiniest of gag reflexes and a mild sense of burning in the throat and in the nasal passage. When she exhaled the thick smoke without coughing she felt the same way she’d felt when Harfu had casually told her that she was good for the city.
Thank you for reading. Part 3 here.