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                                                                         Image courtesy: Fiona Cardoz

  Pictured here with a rare cigarette, 88-year-old Christaline Cardoz was a proud bidi smoker for nearly 50 years before she quit




Often, in the course of interviewing a person over telephone, the two of you connect. At such times, invitations are extended. “You should come home some time,” they say. If you too have warmed up to them, you ask them where they live, so that if you happen to be in the vicinity sometime in the future, you can drop by.


With such people, in this case yours truly, 88-year-old Christaline Cardoz doesn’t bother with the postal address. Affectionately introduced to me as ‘the wicked witch of the family’ by her granddaughter, Cardoz’s fame precedes her.


So if you are to meet her, here’s the drill: go Goa, get down at the capital and head to Mandrem village. Once there, go to the local market or the bus stand – any place where you find taxi drivers lurking around. “Tell them you want to go to Bidi Aunty. They will bring you home,” says the feisty old woman, letting out one of her giggle-a-minute laughs.


Among the locals in the village of pristine beaches, Cardoz and her smoking habit is somewhat of a legend, as is her brashness about it. “The first time I started smoking was when I was carrying my second daughter,” she says candidly. She was 23-years-old then. Though her initiation had happened at the age of eight, it took pregnancy cravings to get her hooked to it.


Back then, Cardoz lived with her husband who worked in the Indian Railways in suburban Mumbai. Over fifty years of living in Mumbai, her children grew up, went abroad and prospered, carving out their own family lives. Cardoz, too, retreated to Goa where they had built a spacious villa, befitting to their now scaled-up social standing. But some old habits die hard. Others don’t at all. Call her a medical marvel but her faithful companion through all the chapters of her life was bidi, a fresh one every twenty minutes.


Of course there was resistance. Her husband, a cigarette smoker who quit after a few years, was keen on his wife following his example. “We used to fight a little because of that,” chuckles Cardoz. “It was fun-fun fights, not hard fights.” One of the reasons frequently brought up was their social standing and good manners. “Husband used to tell me, it’s shameful to smoke bidi. I used to say, why? Am I robbing you? He said, no, it’s about manners. I said, give me money and I will buy manners.”


Christaline Cardoz now lives by herself, occasionally renting out the first floor of her house to tourists. After repeated insistence from daughter-in-law, she has given up smoking, and in turn, imploring her granddaughters from letting her have one more drag. “No no, little bit” is now stuff of past. Her reasons for smoking bidis were never for their affordability. It was something she liked and she didn’t need her social status to dictate that. When someone tried, she had a standard refrain: “It’s not your money.”


***


While a part of the secret to Cardoz’s health might lie in ‘mouth-fagging’ – the process of taking in smoke but never letting it reach the lungs – she is a representative of the rare breed of bidi smokers among the affluent sections of the society. For them, smoking the humble stick of tobacco in a hand-rolled tendu leaf is a lifestyle choice. Even though bidis sell eight times as much as cigarettes in India, the usage is mostly found in the poor and the proletariats, usually in the rural parts. Cardoz, among other members of the bourgeois, are among those who buckle this trend.


Every kind of rolled tobacco has had a popular icon to go with it. If a pipe tickled the fancy of Sherlock Holmes, cigarettes had their share of popularity with the Marlboro Man. Not too long ago, devil’s advocates Denny Crane and Alan Shore from a popular American TV series could be spotted on their office balcony smoking away Cuban cigars to glory. Except for a guest appearance in a popular song by their namesake in the Hindi flick ‘Omkara’, bidi has as yet found it difficult to earn the favour of the popular culture.


A bidi might only be one marketing genius away from exploding into the urban consciousness but if the findings of the Indian chapter of ‘Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) 2009-10’ are to go by, the total population of tobacco smokers in India is already around 111 million. Bidi smokers account for approximately 85% of them.


The statistical data among the affluent stratum of bidi consumers, if available, is hard to be found. “They form a small part of the population,” says Dr Prakash Gupta, director of the Navi Mumbai-based NGO Healis, and a part of GATS and a number of studies on tobacco usage and its proliferation. “There is no public health interest in specially studying them. Besides, income questions get sensitive and complicated.”



What happens when one picks up a bidi not just because of its affordability? For one, they are not too forthcoming about their habits. The white-collar life dictates a certain social decorum; when you offer to tell their stories, their confessions are conditional to the writer promising to mask their identity. Such is the case with 22-year-old Josh Abraham. For him, it certainly wasn’t love at the first puff. It’s a wonder that he has stuck around for more than six months.


“It’s like sipping black coffee, like a very bitter one with no sugar at all,” he says, adding as an afterthought, “I’ll probably add some salt in.”


Abraham works as an art director at an ad agency in Mumbai. A cigarette smoker since he was 16, he was introduced to his vice three weeks into the job by a co-worker, himself a bidi aficionado. The two were at the terrace of the office, a demarcated smoking zone. Abraham was out of cigarettes and his colleague offered him a bidi on a trial basis. Over time, as the bond between the two bloomed, Abraham found himself turning into a chimney, finishing around 20 a day.


His habit has a way of landing him into metaphorical blind alleys when surrounded by friends. At a college reunion recently when he flipped out a bidi, little had he imagined a close friend snatching it from his hands and throwing it into the sewer. Abraham knows their disgust and occasional ridicule stems out of concern. While there are misconceptions about a bidi’s health quotient compared to other addictives, recent studies have established that with its nicotine potency, absence of filters and high quantity of chemicals like phenol, hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide among others, smoking one causes more harm than an average cigarette.


Consequently, Abraham takes precautions to Fort Knox levels when around his parents. Late working hours ensure that he doesn’t bump into them when he returns home around midnight. Since it takes much more than chewing mint to get rid of the smell, he showers before turning in. During weekends and family trips, he keeps his stash far from his reach. He is not addicted to it, he claims, which makes it easy. But once on his office terrace, the seduction of the rolled leaf is hard to resist.


“Maybe it’s because you are a creator,” he explains, through mouthfuls of coffee and burger he is having for breakfast. “Creative people don’t mind trying anything. I have an office where alternating your consciousness on a daily basis is the norm. I have three people on my floor who smoke one [marijuana] joint in the morning, afternoon and evening. So it’s nice that way.”


Later, I join him to take a hit of the stuff that has been fuelling his engines for the past six months. Over three to four puffs, I let the smoke wash over my insides. I rinse my mouth soon after but the taste of burnt paper persists for several minutes.

  
***


It’s perhaps because he is asked about it too often that 27-year-old Dhruv volunteers to spell out his surname. “It’s T-I-K-K-A,” says the man with dense facial fuzz and Punjabi roots. I crack an involuntary smile. It doesn’t escape him. “You can try,” he says, in a tone of resigned amusement. Be warned: chances are that your wisecrack isn’t something he hasn’t already heard before.


At the age of 22, Tikka was pursuing a degree in international politics at the University of Manchester when a friend from India told him he will be coming down to England in a few weeks. Tongue firmly in cheek, Tikka asked him to buy him some bidis. Instead of getting loose sticks or a pack, his friend got him an entire carton consisting of 20 packs.


Tikka had been smoking from high school but he had never tried a bidi. With high prices of cigarettes in the UK, he decided to give it a go. Soon, he was smoking six to seven bidis a day. Once, a professor noticed him smoking one after a class. Curious at the novelty of it, he offered to buy a pack.


“I wasn’t sure what to ask him. At that time, one pack was for five rupees. I was like, ‘Four pounds.’” It was still a winning bid, considering a pack of cigarettes cost six pounds in England. After the transaction, the entrepreneur in Tikka realized he could tap into people’s curiosity to fund his stay. He was soon asking his friends back home to get him more cartons to keep up with the demand. Over the course of two years, he had sold around 150 packets of the homegrown variety.


Now working as a private English tutor for the students of the IB curriculum, Tikka has moved on to smoking a pipe and an occasional cigarette. Every few days though, when he is having a drink or at a music gig, he likes to smoke an odd bidi or two. Other than to satiate the occasional cravings, the intention is to attract attention. In his case, a bidi acts as a conversation starter or at the very least, a catalyst to it.


“I like to see how people react to it,” he confesses. He is usually greeted with two kinds: one of condescension, one of intrigue and amazement.


“If you smoke a bidi, it burns,” he says. “It’s slightly masochistic in approach but it’s an interesting thing. I am going to use an analogy here: cigarettes are like chickens. It’s a boring meat. Everybody does it. A cigar is [like] a good steak. A bidi is like a lamb.”


“And what do you think of a lamb?” I ask.


“I can use some right now,” Tikka titters.


***


For three months in 2013, 22-year-old Pawan Maruvada went off the radar. An engineer by qualification and freelance a copywriter by vocation, Maruvada was increasingly tormented by troubles in his professional and personal life. When he finally ended a relationship with his then partner, Maruvada moved out from his friend’s place in Hyderabad and got himself a new roof, seeking comfort in solace.


As the stack of unfinished assignments towered, Maruvada decided to abandon them completely. The wheels of income grinding to a halt marked the fall of yet another domino. Never a fan of alcohol, he decided to smoke his woes away. It wasn’t long before he was finishing a pack a day, sometimes two.


“Remember those ads played before the beginning of movies these days where they squeeze out a lung and show the tar dripping down?” he writes in an internet chat. “You actually feel the tar, the particulate matter and the chemical sludge sticking to your lungs.”


Over time, he walled himself up indoors except for long strolls at night. His dependence on bidis grew to the point he stopped counting. In a classic case of a chain reaction, he was compromising on his food intake, his smoking neutering his hunger pangs. His body fat dropped and he lost around 18 kilos. From spending thousands of rupees on books, wardrobe and sneakers, he was now reduced to a rent paying automaton and spent days on cups of tea and infrequent titbits. The rest was a smokescreen.


It was October 20, 2013, he remembers vividly. He had finally emerged out of his burrow and taken off to Bangalore for a cultural festival in Bangalore. “Right outside a friend’s place where we were put up, there's a small portable pan shop. I had 12 bucks on me. I went and bought bidis for the day and I passed one to my friend. We walked a few steps ahead on the road and smoked on a small bridge which overlooked a dirty, soapy drainage. I had a few drags and my chest hurt like I was having a seizure. My head started spinning.”


That was the last straw. He had long since wanted to quit but couldn’t bring himself to it. When his insides started feeling like vitriol, Maruvada threw his bidi into the sewers and coaxed his friend to do the same. “Since that day,” he smiles, “I haven't smoked one.”


Maruvada has now been working hard; cooking and eating healthy food. Starting 2014, he has added two new points to his bucket list: to participate in a 5K run and save up enough to travel around the country. Unlike others, Maruvada doesn’t mind giving consent to use his real name. It’s to send a message to all those he has ‘inspired’ to smoke through his college days and after.


“I think it will do some justice for all the misdeed I have done,” he says.


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