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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