My grandmother started smoking her first cigarettes back in the late seventies, a few years before I was born.

At the time, Dadi smoked heavily and at all times of the day. She was rarely without a smoke, so that is how I have come to know her. If I were to paint a portrait of Dadi in my mind, I am almost sure I will picture this unreal, glassy image of a beautiful woman with silver hair and traditionally set diamonds, sitting down in a sari wrapped on a freshly starched petticoat. A flowing pallu, maybe a smidgen of kohl in her eyes. And then, a cigarette in hand that slowly turns into a stub, ash falling to the ground, staining the already old carpet, the carpet ancient with the shuffling feet of memory.

I know what this is. It is the trap of easy romanticism. But it is very hard to get that picture out of my mind even when I see those Dunhill portraits of men in fashion magazines. For me, a cigarette is forever a poster for feminity.

I think I identified with her cigarettes when I was very young. She, my Dadi, was my first peek into its poetry. I liked how her hands smelled because of them and I loved to trace her smoke in the winter fog. This was my favourite time of the day; I would be thrilled that the smoke from her cigarette could blow obstacles out of its way. That it would snake right through the fog, that it could even pierce through the vapour of tea.

This smoke, her smoke fascinated me.

As my mother left me at Dadi’s everyday before she went away to work, I spent a lot of my time in her care. In fact, I do not have any strong recollection of my time with my mother. But I remember little details about Dadi, like her cutting vegetables and watering the tulsi.

I have a set of some very strange memories from my childhood. For example, I vividly recall seeing a frog thrashing about in the milk tray in the fridge and feeling quite happy about it. The story of the milky frog singing in the rain is true (Dadi actually discovered it by its croak, otherwise we might’ve had it for tea), but no one really knows how it got there. I was three at the time.

I really don’t know why but small memories like this, of my times with Dadi, have stuck with me.

But slowly, as was bound to happen, I disassociated myself from her for a small period of time. I remember, after I started going to primary school, I found that it was not easy to love her cigarettes anymore. It unsettled me, her smoking of Classic Milds, her asking the maid to go and buy packs of them. It made me uneasy to see her smoke in her easily tucked-in cotton sari, while making tea, singing quietly along to Lata records. All the while, the odour of tobacco blending in with the sweet smell of tea.

My problem, in retrospect, was just this: school brought with it television and the programmes I saw on it did not show old women smoking. I watched different programmes when I was allowed to but I could not find any image to match the one I had at home. In fact, Doordarshan did not have any women smoking at all. Her smoking felt out of place. And then, she did not have friends who smoked. Timid ladies came and went at all hours, some sixty, others older and more wrinkled, all crisp petticoats, conversing with her in rapid Sindhi about insignificant things, old gossip. But none of them ever came with even a whiff of cigarette smoke. For all these visits, Dadi would change too. All the ashtrays would be locked in her bedroom and she would not smoke one cigarette during the course of the ladies’ stay.

I think, after a while though, I grew used to the idea. With my ten years’ worth of wisdom, I decided she could smoke all she wanted. That there was no escaping our absurdities anymore; that love, perhaps, came with its little absurdities.

My father had told me once that Dadi did not always smoke cigarettes. She had inherited, in fact, a beautiful hookah from her mother-in-law who used to smoke it in her own idle hours. Pa said that the hookah was a relic which his Dadi had clung to in her last years. This hookah, then, was one of the very few things that Dadi’s family brought with them while coming – rather, running – from Pakistan during the partition. That partition which was nothing but a shattered old dream. They had all hoped to go back home, to live their lives as they had, originally. None of the family did ever move back to Lalkana. The old family, the family that came from Pakistan, Dadi was fond of saying, never really had a home. Maybe, with the hookah, what Dadi’s mother-in-law was clinging on to were broken memories.

My grandmother, in her turn, loved the hookah too. It was pretty, it was hand-painted in colourful old Urdu calligraphy. Pa’s Dadi could hardly read Urdu herself, but had bought the hookah from a famous hookah-seller in Sindh for its elegance. My father says she was always the elegant one. Sadly, when it was handed to Dadi after decades and decades of use, its colors had rusted and it was in want of repainting. And then, there were other problems – the tobacco needed brewing, Dadi was growing old, and there wasn’t enough ventilation to go about in her tiny flat in Pahaar Ganj.

For a long time, Dadi was distraught after her hookah. She had smoked it only for a few years and did not want to give the habit up. She was angry that her mother-in-law had not given the hookah to her earlier. She asked people in the trade what could be done. Anything was possible in these new times. Surely there must be smoke-free hookahs nowadays. Finally, Dadi traced the address of the kind gentleman who used to repair the hookah but had stopped coming for many years now. In the days right after the partition, Dadi recounted one afternoon, Khan Sahib was one of the very few Muslims allowed in the refugee town that was built for all the Sindhis near the Delhi ridge. Nobody ever knew his name. Khan Sahib would ride into the colony on his bicycle twice a week and would repair hookahs and other knick-knacks for people. Nobody ever knew where he lived, or why he stopped coming when he did.

Dadi kept him in her memory though. This fondly remembered sahib, who would always be dressed in one of his numerous maroon jackets in the earlier days but was now quietly wilting under quilts older than him, sent a message through my father who had gone to visit him for Dadi. In this witty message, scrawled in Hindi on a piece of newspaper, Khan Sahib suggested brightly that my Dadi leave the hookah to the past – now was the time to try smoking cigarettes. He recommended brands too.

To the dismay of my mother and the amusement of my father, my Dadi almost immediately took to cigarettes. After some early complaints, she started asking for more and more packets. She would smoke in the house while boiling vegetables, in the park under her favorite mango tree, near the Hanuman Mandir at the corner of the lane, outside cinema halls (she would unhappily stub the cigarettes when she had to get in).

I’ve always understood Dadi’s relationship with smoking as something short of a deception. She smoked, I think, to transform herself. Lighting a cigarette was when she grew fragile and interesting. When she made conversation, she would be as old as herself yet as young as me.

It killed me to know that one could be two people all at once. I learnt this deception from her, and it made me love her all the more.

Yes, Dadi made me happy, and I loved her.

This love that we shared made me aware of what was happening around me. I found that I could no longer understand my parents. I tried to do all that I could, but I could not love them anymore. They were always fighting with each other, and they involved me in this strange struggle by alternately loving me and hurting me. It did not take a genius to realize that, soon, they would desert me and, then, they would desert themselves. Maybe they would simultaneously light a match and kill us all one fine Sunday. What was the point of loving, if loving was to blow up in smoke anyway? So I didn’t bother. I didn’t ever love them. Both were pointing out each other’s infidelities to a fourteen year old who, in the middle of it all, soon turned sixteen.

In these strange years, Dadi was the only true family I had, my constant companion. I was fascinated with her. Her habit of smoking, in fact, warmed her to me. It brought a little ease to my life. It showed that she didn’t judge, that she didn’t care to. I lived far from her, but the distance was nothing to me and I visited her the way people visit friends. I didn’t have friends. Even though I talked so much, I didn’t have friends. She kept hers and did not question when I would drop in unannounced with a change of clothes, telling her I wanted to stay for the night. I knew too little of what was going on in her mind, but I went to her from time to time to see how she was, to see how she perceived things. I was growing up and she, her belief system, was growing inside of me.

Of course, Dadi’s vision was not what it used to be and her diabetes had turned a little violent, but she was still full of dialogue and mystery. She held opinion on fruits and men. She found it odd I wasn’t attracted to either. She thought that I did not smile enough. This was possibly the only complaint she had against me. Yet, it was just the way I had come to be.

And then, she was patient with me. Even though Dadi knew very little English and could not understand why one would even need to read novels when one could watch movies, she listened to the stories I had written. I think she respected the art of writing. And, writing on the tops of coffee tables in the drawing room while the maid swept the rooms, I would tell Dadi everything I wrote, in translation. She liked stories that talked of places other than India. She had never been abroad and wanted to know about Milan and Paris. She told me she had seen movies about them. I think she believed in love. She deeply objected to people drifting apart in my stories.

I still don’t know how she took the failure of my parents’ marriage. I only know that she seemed happy when she got to keep me. She did not say anything about the separation when my mother moved cities to get away from my father. He moved in with his lover; simultaneously, I moved out to go to Dadi’s. It was complicated, I guess, and she bore it well for me.

I like to think that my happiness really began then. Happiness, before that time, was just a novel in my mind. It was on my eighteenth birthday when I finally got a home in the curled-up smoke of a Pahaar Ganj flat, where someone would listen to my stories all day long. I supplied her with Classic Milds and she never raised awkward questions. It looked as if I had made my choice and had asked for abandonment. It was true, and she knew it was true. I like to think that she respected that choice. She even gave me a couple of smokes from her cigarette sometimes, in a fit of camaraderie perhaps, but she never encouraged me to smoke. And I didn’t.

“Moping about is for idiots,” she said.

“I don’t mope,” I replied.

“That’s why I love you.”

Instead of growing older, time slipped from me and I got younger and more carefree. My stories changed and, sometimes, they even had happy endings. I lost my voice of a forty-five year old woman and turned into a girl “with the makings of a storm”. I think that, for a while, I even fell in love with the man who said that to me.

I painted my toenails red and started smelling of perfume.

We lived happily for a while, yes, Dadi and I. I went to college a free person with the meager allowance that Dadi provided me.

“This won’t help even a plant grow on its own,” I would joke to her about my allowance.

“This is all there is,” she would puff her ring of smoke into me.

“This is all there is,” I would echo, and turn into a ring of smoke myself.

The money, quite obviously, came from the father who was free-fucking more and more people everyday, but I guess it was okay. We were just happy we had the money. It was never about him anyway.

Fantastically, Dadi held on to being sixty for a while, and it was a very long while. I changed preferences from prose to poetry and went and began my doctorate in English literature. This period lasted, roughly, a decade. And then, one day, when I returned home from university, I found that my Dadi had turned seventy in a span of hours. It felt like we were in a wretched Hindi drama. More wrinkles had latched on her skin. The maid told me that Dadi had vomited several times.

“You look a different person,” I said to her, forcibly smiling.

Dadi, my dadi, she didn’t reply.

We checked ourselves in to a hospital.

That ambulance ride was difficult. It was one of the very few times in my life that I felt lonely in my aloneness. Age had caught up with Dadi in a way that frightened me. Her ageing made me vulnerable. It gave me tight knots in my stomach. Everything felt unreal. All the time that we were in the hospital, I didn’t eat. I didn’t weep either. They said something about old age and heart trouble and sent us home after two days. My father dropped in to pay the bills. He cried on my shoulder for the very first time.

After we came back home, Dadi stopped saying much. She didn’t walk as much as she used to and cut down on her visits to the gurudwara. She avoided phone calls because she didn’t want to tell people that she was, finally, sick. It was her pride that always got in the way of seeking affection. Seeking affection, to her, meant asking for sympathy. It was no better than pity. Time passed, she got angrier and more reclusive, only sometimes slipping into her earlier gentle self with me. She submitted to my checking her blood pressure regularly, but she would get depressed when I would do it. So many times, she would look at me like she wanted to apologize for her body giving up on her, on me.

Only one thing was the same as before: she went on smoking the same cigarettes. Those cigarettes smelt better than the smells of her ageing.

I realized something then – that I had never been in an intense love, that I did not know it at all and that all my stories were a scam. That Dadi was the only person who could make me understand it. This hurt me, knowing that love could die in ways different from the usual falling-apart between people. I found out that love could die in a more tangible way. That it could age and whither away like a leaf, leathery and dusty. That it could smell of something dark and terrifying, that it could physically shrink two sizes and lower itself into a bedridden mess.

I hated knowing this love. I grew angry at myself, at her, at everything else. Dadi had no right to behave in such a way. She was right in apologizing the way she did. Because even she knew the truth about our conjoined lives. She knew that all that we really had was each other.

I did not know where to complain. So I wandered the streets of Delhi alone, looking around for help. After a while, the answer presented itself to me. I understood that I needed to learn to live alone again. So I didn’t go home until it had grown very late and she called me back to her.

I hated knowing this love, I hated knowing her then. Hated how she so pragmatically signed away her apartment in my name, telling me that her “time was near”, where her jewelry was kept, where the keys to the “family” crockery were hidden. I didn’t fucking care about crockery. She told me which of her saris were to be passed on to Ma. She also made me promise to make sure that Pa personally called people up for her funeral. She said that she would rather have me do it, out of love, but that she was “old fashioned” that way. One day, in my one moment of sanity, I jokingly asked who was to inherit her cigarette cases and ashtrays. Dadi said I could give them away to whomever I wanted, just that I must never smoke in them.

I… I don’t know how it happened exactly. Dadi’s cigarettes just died one day, with her.

She died. She stopped smoking. She stopped her everyday brooding. She stopped loving me.

The only other person who had ever loved me was there to take care of all this. He had never known Dadi. But he was there. We, the two of us, we cleared out her bed. He lifted her up in her tangled cotton sari, while the maid looked for Dadi’s telephone diary and called Pa. I remember it rained madly, the day she went away.

Pa came home immediately and cried, again, on my shoulder. My own delirium chilled into a quietness, seeing him so unhappy. Deliberately, Dadi hadn’t left anything for Pa. I told him that all her cigarette cases and ashtrays were his. I made the maid fish for the old hookah and gave that to him too. I had never seen Pa look so tired before. For a moment, maybe two, I was scared that, right before me, he would age a decade too.

Pa called everyone to the funeral, just as Dadi had wanted. She had made a list for him to call. I didn’t have to ask. Pa called everyone to the funeral except Ma. He knew for a fact that Ma had loved Dadi. Her name was the first on the list. He knew I knew. But we couldn’t say anything to each other about it.

In the gurudwara, sitting next to Pa, I wasn’t thinking of my grandmother who had loved me so much. To be sure, I wasn’t feeling anything. I was looking at my father stare emptily at Dadi’s photograph for the whole duration of the paath. My father had denied Ma the last chance to meet my Dadi, despite her wanting the reconciliation. It made me think that, had I died instead of Dadi, he would have done the same thing. He would have kept me to himself.

He didn’t deserve to keep me or Dadi to himself.

For a small moment in time, I started to love my mother and hate my father. I made my lover promise me that he would call Ma if I died.