“What! You actually saw her puffing away in
public?” I asked my husband with an incredulous expression, admiring the
woman-in-question’s guts. I was reacting to his claim that he had just seen a
female pillion rider smoking away to glory while on the busy Bailey Road of the
city. “Yeah….it surprised me too. But I reckon Patna is changing,” he replied
matter-of-factly, and that was the end of it.
The next incident occurred closer home than
I had anticipated. I’d gone out to meet some girlfriends at a posh hotel on a
crispy Sunday afternoon. After indulging in a heady dose of gluttony (lunch
preceded by flutes of cocktails, two of them knocked over the table spread),
some of my friends started chanting for a smoke.
We asked the waiter about buying a pack
from the hotel lounge, but decided against it when he quoted double the market
price. Hence, we embarked on our girlie quest to buy cigarettes from some local
paan-wallah and enjoy the pleasures of smoke while safely ensconced inside my
car.
After many giggling bouts and much
awkwardness (the street vendors all stared at the 5 of us when we peered
surreptitiously from the car’s tinted windows and asked for a pack), we finally
managed to buy one, the contents of which were soon disintegrated in a puff of
smoke, literally!
That got me thinking, that tobacco
disclaimers notwithstanding, why are we small-town women so scared of diluting
our puritan images within the boundaries of our hometown? How many of us have
smoked or boozed when we went to other states for higher studies? Or rather,
how many of us have refrained from these so-called “bad habits” while left to
our own devices in metro cities, unchaperoned? Not many, would be my guess.
And yet, there it was, that cosmic “dark
matter” holding us back from smoking in full view that day (my friends enjoyed
the sinful sticks within the car while I drove around, with the windows pulled
up, obviously).
“Someone known to me will spot me”, “It
does not look good”, “Why, I never touched a smoke in my life!”, and so
on….these are the usual refrains one gets to hear when the topic of cigarette
crops up. B/S. And you would have us believe that you stayed
in New Delhi/ Mumbai/ Bangalore/ Pune and posted your semi-nude, fully-drunk
party pictures on FB with alarming frequency without once giving in to the vice
of smoke ‘n’ spirit?
Awww…. Come on! We can do better than this.
We can be better than this. What’s wrong with giving in to our
urges? At a social do, men taking drags is okay, but we like to sit back like
demure li’l ladies, talking among ourselves of clothes and house and children.
While some of us women may take great joy in such discussions, there are many
others who would be yearning for a drag themselves but hold back just for the
fear of social stigma.
Hens. That’s
what we’ve become.
Inexplicable as this phenomenon is, in a
city like Patna and a state like Bihar, it rules. We are prudes when it comes
to being open. When stuff as mundane as smoking in public can get us all
jittery, imagine the scare when choices as personal as your sexual orientation
would need to be declared. Phew!
Perhaps that’s why, to me, this smoking
double-standard personifies lack of personal emancipation. It’s my life, but
knowing that if I declare my love for fags openly I’ll be labelled of loose
morals and bad character, I choose to play my part in the game and suppress my
urges.
