RUNNING the risk of sounding like a hypochondriac confined to the isolated room of a house because of his love for cheap brands, I begin this piece by saying I am nursing a nasty chest infection. I can cough up enormous beakers of fluid. Still, I have not quit smoking.
“You have ruined your health and energy,” a comment my friends cannot help passing as they look at me. I seldom lend an attentive ear to them, not because I am taking protein supplements, but because I have not been able to meet them lately. Sickness and depression are an asocial combination.
I pick up an old hardbound text of Hamlet and open a page randomly. I have of late, from where I know not, lost all my mirth, so says the protagonist at the end of Act II. The lines seem relevant to the story of this addicted hedonist in search of peace. Should I blame cigarettes for this? Is it an indication from void that it’s high time I did away with a smoky canvas? I put the book aside and stroll down the amnesia lane.
After 12 years of unhampered smoking, I have turned 28. I am desperately aware of my own mortality as I lie sweating, feverish like an I-can-go-anytime plonker.
It was an evening full of gaiety. All the friends had gathered to celebrate the As bagged in O-levels back in 1994. I was always a late learner, the only fact my friends despised. I had vowed that evening to prove them wrong. Those were the dinners full of excitement. We ate steaks, desserts, and the extraordinaire CK Cake Alaska. Something awaited my eagerness to learn. All of my friends, and I mean not a single exception, stirred the Zippo sound. And before I could lure myself to learn late this time as well, I was tested by the generous and almost compulsive offer to smoke. And I smoked my first cigarette.
Sometimes friends can be mean. After all, now when they are over with smoke-work, why have they become so unsympathetic in passing comments?
I remember how our seniors threw a welcome party for A-level students and I smoked again. I felt dizzy, had a sore throat. And sooner than a month I could smoke 40 cigarettes a day. I admit, it looked chic then.
I recall how I tried to stop smoking once. The errand lasted only for five minutes when a shameless bus injected not less than an atmosphere of black smoke right into my car on my way to college. I am not emphysematous in my own country, but I learned two lessons: it is a good idea to keep the windows of the car closed while travelling even in June, and trying to keep your lungs clean from smoke is impossible — so it is no use quitting smoking.
I at times almost forgot smoking, but never left it. One or two cigarettes a day are the likely minimal daily statistics. I was still to see the rise, the exponential rise, when I started looking for a job. That was the time when nicotine usage was optimal.
With smoke I formed a bond that would last how long I know not. I started teaching. I worked hard and I smoked fast. The two elements seemed so intertwined. I would pick a book and smoke a cigarette. I found a good excuse to light another one, sometimes just because I finished reading two pages of a book.
Around a year of teaching experience is shadowed in not only physical but cerebral challenge too. I am still convincing myself to give up smoking and coax myself into believing that I am not a compulsive smoker. I could not manage to escape the vigilant and careful sense of clairvoyance acutely profound in my parents. My mom knows for certain I am a chronic smoker.
I always keep a just-in-case cigarette, like the other three I keep for smoking before each lecture. Healthy heart aside, here is a male role model who accidentally-on-purpose smokes in front of his students before going to the class. It is a fight throughout the day for the last cigarette of my life. I wonder how many more are in store for me. I must admit my students are very sympathetic. When you are a well-known person, whatever you do, you probably have to pay a price for it. And it has an interesting effect on your life. You have to consider: Do you approve of what you are doing? Do you approve of it enough that you want to hear about it for the rest of your days?
I feel there is a lot of goofy, absurd humour in this quest for health, longevity, and peace. My heart aches and I am terrified to the last particle of my bones. The gentle lady doctor convinces me my heart seems so far all right but I should leave smoking at once. My heart still aches and I despise the clouds I built willingly all through the day. To show her affection, to cure the malady of heart, the gentle lady suggests that I take aspirin for five years. Had it not been for her coquette persuasion, I am the last person on earth on gulp down a tablet.
I read the interpretation of dreams, but Freud’s view seems limited. I am not a misogynist, but if smoking was some kind of masculine sublimation, why do women smoke? I guess, I do not hate smoking. I just want to hate smoking. And that is why I am still a compulsive chronic smoker.
A friend calls me to ask about my health. He got married a few months ago. I tell him I plan to quit it finally, but his gob-stoppingly embarrassing laughter and his unprepossessing advice leave me gawping. “Keep your cigarettes for post-coital conversations.” I wonder what this sophisticate, rearing dandified aesthetics, knows of oceanic feeling that I have recently found in celibacy. I harrumph and try to hang up. “Think about it,” says the adenoidal voice.
Is it necessary to get married to reduce smoking? In that case, I shall not leave it anytime soon. Smoking is the only thing which lowers my standard of things and makes loose my cigarette-specific values. I take the aspirin, get up and smoke the last cigarette — the last that never comes. Perhaps I am a late learner.
