Smoke - It Makes You Fly

Note: I have always been fascinated by the experience my peers share in terms of their smoking, so I took to personally interviewing some of my friends (almost an ethnographic research) towards getting to understand their world & experience so I could write this post for you all.

Disclaimer: By no means are we encouraging smoking behavior among any age group, cohort. The post is purely written with a mixture of imagination and experience derived from participants in the research.

Credit:Unsplash

Flanked by a confounding number of strangers from diverse walks of life, from diverse vocations, status, mentalities, you have one spot where the probability of 10 completely different people meeting at one random place, become one. It ain't holy, it ain't saint-like, it ain't Christian. Yet it is one that invites a lot of these completely unrelated souls. “Chai Sutta ka Tapri” (Tea kadai with cigarette)

Though there are million other places in the world, a mall, a theatre, a restaurant, or a retail store, this place has something unique about it. However uncommon the customer base is, the experience is innately and inexplicably liberating. Maybe it is the uncommonness that makes the experience so liberating.

Soothing zephyr of night, the chaotic crowd of the evening, unwelcoming warm weather of noon, or unready-yet-ready moment of morning, you call it, there is no moment that isn’t right for it. Maybe all it needs is not a cloudy sky, but a clouded mind to rejoice the disturbingly calm experience the smoke gives. It knows no weather, no vocation, no bucks your empty pocket may encompass.  17 rupees is all it takes to slip away to a seductive world of the sensory state where sorrows sway for seconds

Yelled at by your manager, petty fight with your girl, untraceable stress creeping its way to your soul, a fag makes it fade like it was never born.
“Harmful it is, the soul knows;
Sustainable way it isn’t, the mind knows;
Not a bit healthy, all of you knows;”

Yet your fingers pull them up from a pack of tightly packed army of magic like magnet clasps metal from a messy mess. And you drag like the world around you has faded and it is just you and the fag, in a toxic relationship knowing you are unhealthy for each other, yet not letting go because you can’t see a life without it.

You put it in the between of your lips like “style” in the mid of a flower; you light a narrow streak of fire, that pops at times cute, at times ferocious; And you breathe. You breathe like that was the first-ever time you breathed or your inhaler just worked after million light-years.  You know you are taking in a substance made of unhealthy ingredients, yet somehow magically it calms your soul, soothes your mind, with panacea transiently popping in front of your eyes. And you wonder how the way for a healthy solution is sometimes, something unhealthy. Like the way for positivity is a little bit of controllable negativity, like a pinch of salt makes lumps of sweet better.

And you pause for a second and take a look around, you see thousand other messed up souls, associated yet disassociated, tangled yet liberated, standing next to you yet flying in their own worlds

And you think to yourself, “If this isn’t magic, what else is?”

Smoke, it does make you fly; even if it is an inseparable & insanely toxic relationship between the two of you.

Am I in a relationship or not? I don’t know.

But the question is - Are you?