A Puff of Smoke, a World of Memory
A Puff of Smoke, a World of Memory
Boys learn the important lessons not in classrooms, but on borrowed bicycles, dusty excursions, and quiet bridges where only crows are watching.
Iwas fifteen when I first smoked a cigarette, and I have been mildly embarrassed about it ever since. Not because smoking is a terrible thing – there are far worse habits a boy can acquire in the hills – but because I was so very bad at it. My friend Ajit could blow smoke rings with the ease of a conjurer, each one drifting up into the pine-scented air like a small, surprised halo. I stood beside him, coughing heroically, and tried to look as though I had done this before.
The pines were not impressed. They have seen generations of boys make fools of themselves, and they keep their counsel.
My real initiation came later, away from the hills, in the flat and ordinary heat of home. One quiet afternoon I borrowed my father’s bicycle – borrowed being the polite word for it – and rode out toward Mahara, until the houses thinned and the road became a narrow, personal sort of thing. There I found a small bridge, the kind that no one has ever thought to name or paint or write about, and I decided it was the perfect stage for growing up.
I had a single menthol cigarette in my pocket. It had cost me twelve cents, which was a considerable sum for a boy of my means, and I lit it with the gravity of someone undertaking an important experiment. I drew the smoke in properly. The world tilted. For ten long minutes I held the railing and wondered, with some urgency, whether I was dying or merely becoming an adult. I was not entirely sure which prospect frightened me more.
When the dizziness passed, I climbed back onto the bicycle and rode home, somewhat less heroic than when I had set out. A crow watched me from a post. Crows, in my experience, are reliable keepers of a boy’s secrets. They have their own dignities to maintain.
The next chapter was written at Sigiriya and the Dambulla caves, on a school excursion that I remember with the particular fondness one reserves for days that were slightly larger than life. We were in Year Ten. I had recently graduated from short trousers to long ones, and this promotion had given me ideas above my station.
For five cents I had procured a small brown cigar – the sort that smells faintly of dust and mild catastrophe – and I had been waiting for the right theatrical moment to produce it. The bus had started from my uncle’s house: D. J. Antony, who was both my class teacher and my mother’s cousin, a combination that should have discouraged any mischief but, being sixteen, I managed to overlook this inconvenience.
The bus was full of boys and their noise – half-remembered songs, unfinished jokes, the innocent commotion of youth moving cheerfully through the countryside. D. J. Antony sat at the front with the patience of a man who has accepted that boys will be boys, and has decided the best one can do is see they arrive home in roughly the same shape they departed.
We climbed the rock. We wandered through caves whose ancient frescoes regarded us with that particular expression of painted ladies who have seen too much. And somewhere in the warmth of that afternoon, among the ruins and the red earth, I stepped aside from the group and lit my cigar.
I had barely exhaled my first brave cloud of smoke when I became aware of being watched. I turned. There was D. J. Antony, looking at me in the way that certain uncles and teachers have perfected over centuries – a look compounded of disappointment, understanding, and, I thought, somewhere very deep inside it, the ghost of amusement. He said nothing. He did not confiscate the cigar. He simply looked, and then, with admirable restraint, turned away.
I spent the rest of the excursion in my long trousers, sweating more from apprehension than from the heat, waiting for the storm that never arrived. He never mentioned it to my mother. Not once. Not ever. In all the years that followed, when he came to visit our home, the afternoon at Sigiriya remained between us – unspoken, quietly understood.
I learned more from that one look than from all the moral science lessons I had ever been set. Silence, in the right hands, is the most eloquent language there is.
As I grew older and acquired a monthly wage, I funded my habit with more regularity and rather less romance. I bought Bristols, one cigarette at a time – only wealthy boys bought whole packets – and I smoked them in the small lanes around our village, never on our own street, never where my parents might appear without warning. To smoke was one thing. To be seen smoking was another matter entirely.
An older colleague at work, who had always seemed a kindly sort, visited our home one evening and announced to my parents, in the manner of someone delivering important intelligence, that I smoked at the office – one cigarette after another, he said, which was a considerable exaggeration. Six was my absolute maximum. My father shrugged. My mother did not.
For some time after that, she would quietly inspect my clothes when I came home, and occasionally offer the observation that I did not need a cigarette to prove I was a man. Her disappointment was of the gentle, persistent variety – the kind that settles into a boy and stays there long after the smoke has cleared.
Dubai was a new chapter, as it is for so many. I went there and acquired foreign currency, a certain seriousness about myself, and the curious prestige of being able to return to Sri Lanka with cartons of cigarettes to distribute among friends – a level of largesse that would have astonished the boy on the Mahara bridge with his single menthol and his twelve cents.
My father and I had arrived, by then, at a quiet companionship of the kind that forms between men when the arguing is done. He saw me light a cigarette and made no comment. The battle was over; there was nothing more to negotiate. As for my mother, I had learned to avoid her eyes on such occasions. The romance of defiance had departed. I was no longer smoking against anyone. I was simply smoking, which is never quite as interesting.
In Dubai the habit arranged itself into a ceremony. A cigarette with the morning tea, just before the day began. I graduated through the brands with the air of a man conducting research – Marlboro when I felt adventurous, Silk Cut when I felt the vague, mild weight of middle age coming on at twenty-something, purple packets first, then blue.
It was in Dubai, too, that I met Rafees – a few years older, a courier driver, a man whose story was heavier than my little experiments in sophistication. He had gone home to Sri Lanka to marry. Two weeks with his new wife; the ceremony, the customs, the blessings of families. Back in Sharjah, driving his van and arranging her visa, he received news that she had been shot – a stray bullet from the police, entering from the front, leaving through the back. She died on the spot.
There are sentences one carries for life. That was one of them.
I tried to be his friend, in the limited, inadequate way one can be a friend to grief. We talked. We sat together in the particular silence of men who have run out of useful things to say. And it was somewhere in those months – between Dubai and Sharjah, between one failed attempt to quit and another – that I finally gave up smoking. Not dramatically. Not with announcements. It simply stopped, the way certain chapters of a life stop, quietly, when you are looking elsewhere.
I also introduced Rafees, in time, to a young woman – all prayers and scarves, the elder sister of a girl I had been spending time with. I drifted from the girl, as young men do. Rafees did not drift from his. They married quietly, and I am told they have grown children now, and grandchildren, in Sri Lanka. It is a good ending to a sad beginning.
Looking back – and there is a particular pleasure in looking back from a comfortable distance – I understand that the cigarettes were never really the story. They were only the excuse, the prop, the thin thread on which all the real moments were strung: the uncle who said nothing, the mother who sniffed my shirt, the father who looked away, the friend who offered a Bristol from his last packet without being asked, the other friend whose loss made all small habits seem very small indeed.
The smoke drifted away long ago, carried off by hills and bridges and old bus journeys.
But the faces remain, as they always do – lit softly, stubbornly, by the quiet and persistent light of memory.
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