Much too late for a ban

From today on, cigarette smoking is banned in public places. This includes roads, railways stations, airports, restaurants (that seat less than 30 guests) and pubs.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

My father worked for a cigarette company for 14 years. He moved to Hyderabad in 1970 to take up the job and he stepped across some line then. Suddenly, his life was something he could never have imagined; it must have a been a culture shock but he took it well. He started smoking because cigarettes were, naturally, freely available. When he returned home from work and I buried my head in his neck, it was the cigarette smell that signalled appa.

People like us - the families of those who worked in cigarette companies - were the last to know about the health risks. Perhaps we were just the last to heed it. It was only because my mother and I stood so often on that line that divided us from the rest of the family and wathced life from both sides that we didn't start smoking; so many women in our circle did.

So my father smoked a few then a pack and then two packs a day. There were always ashtrays. I broke one when I was little and its pair is a reminder of the other one. I think the one I broke was a peachy-pink. It was solid glass, oval but pinched in the middle for cigarettes to rest in.

It wasn't until the late '80s that we began to see changes in my father that were definitely linked to smoking. The cough, for one. Mornings would begin with that. During vacations, I would wake up with that hacking cough that came from deep inside, as if his insides were trying to turn themselves out. I would lie rigid in bed, waiting for the fit to pass. (These days, I lie in bed rigid and waiting for a cough that we will never again hear.)

Once, mymother wrote me a letter in college. She began by talking about regular things. I turned a page and she said, "Don't be alarmed but - " Whatever she said to me, it was clear she was not just alarmed, she was very worried. It appeared that my father had, a couple of time, had such bad coughing fits that he couldn't breathe and had fainted. I was frantic with worry. I called my father andhe reassured me, listen to me ranting and promised to quit.

It was a promise he was to make several times in the years that followed. It was from him that I learnt all the vain braggadacio of smokers: I can quit whenever I want. I am not really addicted; I smoke because I enjoy it. I'm smoking much less than I used to. I swear. I smoke only four or five cigarettes a day.

Then the sincere attempt, the withdrawal symptoms, that irritability, the lighters discarded, the ashtrays put away, and inevitably the slide back.

I can't remember when my father stopped smoking in the house. He took his lighter to the terrace/balcony and kept a lighter somewhere where we couldn't see it. It looked as if no one in the house smoked. On rainy days, though, he would stand at the window with his mouth at the grill and blow the smoke out. My mother would fume and fine some excuse to pick a fight with him about something else.

Even after his major illness was diagnosed, he continued to smoke. It wasn't until he was rushed to hospital with internal bleeding caused by excessive coughing a couple of years ago that my father finally stopped smoking. This time it was really permanent. He never smoked another cigarette again. Ironically, it was only after this that his lungs began to get worse and then collapsed.

A few days ago, my mother said she dreamt of appa for the first time since he died. She dreamt he was in hospital, irritable the way he was when he really was there. And he was smoking. Lying in bed in his pink hospital robes, with his thin shoulders on the pillow and his arms attached to tubes and the oxygen tube in his nostrils, he was smoking.

I feel capable of great violence when I think of it.