Rising above the smoke

Children grow up cultivating hobbies. I was no exception. I had quite a few of them. Collecting stamps and coins, newspaper clippings of cricketers, reading Enid Blyton and Hardy Boys novels, riding bullock carts and bicycles, and watching the passing vehicles from a vantage point—all filled my leisure hours during my formative days in my dear old town, Sandur. Besides these usual hobbies, I had one particular hobby, though not in any way remarkable: collecting discarded cigarette packets!

Gold Flake & Wills, Honey Dew & Passing Show, Berkley & Scissors, Charminar & Panama, and many more were all in my collection. With these, I would play various self-devised games till I was tired or was called away to run some household errands.

When I learned how to cycle and acquired one, I used to punch a cigarette packet on the rear wheel brake clamp so that when the wheel rotated, its spokes struck the packet, emitting a ‘put-put-put’ sound in imitation of the motorcycle. That innovation thrilled me with a certain boyish pride!

Of all the discarded cigarette packets in my possession, ‘555 State Express’ (made in England) was my prized possession. One of the senior partners in the family-run mining business firm where my father was employed, the first graduate in their family and an alumnus of the famous Madras Presidency College, smoked these cigarettes. They were hinged-lid packets — as the technical expression goes, very durable and attractive—unlike the present-day ones with grotesque statutory warnings. He would give me the empty packets. Even today, I can close my eyes and smell the rich aroma of premium tobaccos that are machine-rolled into those cigarettes. 

These ‘555’ packets stoked a certain desire in me to smoke these cigarettes when I grew up. But, strangely, as I grew older, that fancy lost its hold on me. By the time I was twenty or twenty-one, I had become a confirmed non-smoker without ever smoking a single cigarette!

Inscrutable are the ways of God. Perhaps as a reward for becoming a confirmed non-smoker so early in life, God paved my way into the Corporate Legal Department of ITC Ltd, Kolkata, from where I retired after over 22 years of service. In the course of my career at ITC, I had to largely deal with tobacco-related taxation issues and other allied matters at various levels of judicial hierarchy, including the Supreme Court. In due course, I gained an enviable insight into every legal aspect of Virginia tobacco—its cultivation, stages of conversion, and eventually its sale as machine-rolled cigarettes. What do you call it, if not a non-smoker’s reward?