Ashtray

Tanmoy da never had the space between his index and middle fingers empty. We used to joke that he would probably do a drowning man’s hand on his marriage night. The day I met him last was a Saturday afternoon in a dingy, cramped shared corridor of the TATA cancer research facility in Khargar, Navi Mumbai. For a majestic being like Tanmoy da, who liked to live life king size, this was like a Cuban cigar being stubbed in horse piss.

Tanmoy da’s father was a small-scale businessman who had a couple of metalwork factories in Garia. Compared to an average middle class family, he was obviously richer and made sure that his son never had to ask anyone for anything. With an abundance of funds and an unbelievably good nature, Tanmoy da was the cigarette sponsor for a lot of us in our university days. I remember he had told us once that he picked up smoking after his elder sister introduced him to Gold Flake. He quipped, “I am just passing on the torch to the next generation.” He always got pissed if we lingered with one in our hands, not taking a puff every now and then.

Tanmoy da was diagnosed with cancer when he was thirty four years old. His wife informed us that what started as a persistent cough in the initial stages had become bloody coagulated mucous within a month. The first reports had shown massive damage to the larynx and had demanded a rigorous chemotherapy treatment within the next forty eight hours. After six months of blood turning into acid and breath changing into tear gas, Tanmoy da emerged, battle scarred, yet alive. There were the obvious complications that come with a second chance. Trudging through a plethora of antibiotics, kidney medications and anti-allergens, a man who weighed well over ninety kilos, eventually dried up into a twig of sixty kilos or so. But he lived, survived, joined office within the year and lived to see another birthday. “Only one regret,” he murmured on his birthday at the dinner table, “I had to give her up.” “Who,” I asked, amused. He had wandered off somewhere else, as he blankly stared at the city outside, from his fifth floor French window. I figured that the answer was not intentionally cryptic. I fumbled in my pocket for a smoke and then remembered that we had decided not to do that anywhere close to Tanmoy da, even on the way to his home.

There was a time when we used to hang out on weekends at his place: curtains closed, a bright computer monitor, the CRT seventeen-inch, and some movie from the likes of Mission Impossible or Die Hard running in high volume. The hero would somehow manage to pull off a Houdini and defeat an entire army of goons and criminals. As he finished his fictional Jihad against everything evil, he would stand lopsided, tired, victorious, big guns smoking hot. As the strings of smoke from the cigarettes defied gravity, slithered up and moved towards the screen, we would imagine the smoke from the guns to merge with the wisp from our cigarettes, and feel like a bruised and battered Bruce Willis, grinning away with a cigar in his mouth. His sheets reeking of medical antiseptic, with a drip stuck to his arm and several patches over his exposed body, these memories seemed to make him relaxed, prepared for what was ahead. He greeted these stories with a chuckle like a long lost friend, but did not spend enough time dwelling on the past in a practiced manner. “Nothing lasts forever,” he hummed, “not money, not life, not even cancer.”

Tanmoy da and I had always shared an interest in horror films. He was an avid collector and I was a horror junkie. So when the dust settled down and the action heroes went back home, and the light dimmed away like an LCD screen pressed sharply at random places, it was time for us to watch and be afraid. Once, we had watched a Korean horror flick and could not go to the kitchen for a drink for an entire night. We sat there, motionless, eyes peeled at the corridor, and waited for dawn, counting seconds, one at a time. The longest four hours of our lives, the funniest too! After that, Tanmoy da always ensured a bottle of water in the room and we closed the corridor doors when it was movie time.

Tanmoy da’s cancer returned within one year. This time, it was lesions on his skin – round, pixelated edges, a very rare pattern. Doctors suspected a relapse, and all organs including blood being affected by the disease. To everyone’s surprise though, it was just his skin being burnt away by cancer. Doctors figured that the chances were better than average since it was not a progressive relapse. Tanmoy da croaked, “So can I smoke now? I won’t survive without her, you know, she’ll kill me for sure.” After much coaxing, however, he was convinced about smoking being the worst possible idea right then, and decided to go ahead with further sessions of systemic therapy. The treatments failed miserably. As a man’s skin became dotted with scars like a toad, all the horrific pictures from cigarette packets and biology chronicles looked like nightmares coming true. His health trickled away and his wealth trickled faster. Very soon, he was enclosed to a shared dorm of cancer patients, undergoing experimental treatments, otherwise known as the poor man’s morgue.

We used to hang out every weekend for a good reason or lack of it. But after my transfer the frequency dwindled down to once every three, maybe four months. Once he fell ill however, I started visiting him more and more, and if not for the ailment, I would feel rejuvenated every time. Every single time, I used to carry my laptop and we watched a horror film together, leaning on limping chairs and rusty beds. The effect was just not the same with the laptop speakers, but seeing a dying man feel life while being scared made me question my sanity more than once. “This is just not it you know,” he said, “I am spinning the best horror story ever.” “I will tell you another day,” he said meekly. “What if you kick it tonight?” I asked with an awkward grin. He looked at me with a stone cold gaze and smiled, “She won’t let me go, not until she takes me.” So, on a scorching Saturday afternoon, when Tanmoy da said he would tell me his horror story, I melted away into a blue gray abyss, hope coma if something like that would exist, to see a man give up the fight and prepare himself for the inevitable.

Contrary to popular belief that my sister had baptized me to the sinful faith, I had actually started smoking at the age of fifteen, stealing a pack of cigarettes from my father. My mother had already passed away by then, so my sister was the only one who knew of this habit. We used to go to the roof on tiptoes and engage in this ‘grown-up’ activity. She tried to blackmail me once about it but I managed to dodge it by offering her a counter drag. She picked up the habit just for the ‘cool’ factor in it; she used to fake it, for sure.

“You are going to tell me a horror story, right?” I interrupted.

“Stop irking a dying fool, listen good, listen close!” he whispered.

I moved to this city as soon as I landed a job and had a lot of headaches to take care of in the first few days. I was already smoking a packet a day and soon it went up to two. Thankfully, with a good-paying job, I was able to maintain the habit. The wrought iron bed and the Monel metal ashtray I bought during one such shopping sprees are the crown jewels at my home. So one fine afternoon, Mumbai rains bathing the city, still not in the drowning mode, you know what I mean, I am sitting on the edge, one leg folded, the other stretched over it. I am watching a paused screen on my laptop from an old university video, a cigarette hanging clumsily in my mouth. As ash towered at the end of the cigarette, I stretched my hands around the edge for the ashtray beneath the bed, fingers stretched, searching for a familiar grooved rim.

Tanmoy da stopped for a drink. He looked paler or … was it the dimming of the day. His actions were sharper though, more energetic, at least for a man with advanced cancer. I opened my shoes and stretched my legs on his bed which squeaked in anguish. The family from the adjacent bed frowned and said something in Marathi.

That’s when our hands touched for the first time.

“Whose hand? We were at the ashtray-picking part where you stretched your hands and …”

You are not listening closely. That is when our hands touched for the first time. Nothing unnatural, very real, yet impossible. I jumped up on the bed, the cigarette flew to the ground and the ashtray ended on the floor with a loud clang. I slumped back to the corner of the wall on my bed and looked intensely at the ashtray lying toppled on the ground. I rubbed my eyes, shook my head and as soon as I looked again, it was gone. I was sweating worse than a prisoner on death row. I inched closer to the edge of the bed, my muscles taut and paining from the tension and strain of moving at a microscopic pace. I peeped over the edge and finally in one swift motion I looked underneath.

“And you saw something, didn’t you?”

Yes

“Was it gross? Was it just your mind playing tricks on you? You are making this up as we go, aren’t you?”

Just shut up and listen, I don’t have much time to explain everything to you, you retard.

“Huh, I bet I can predict the end,” I said, drawing my feet back on the chair.

I saw an inverted floor, inverted boxes, inverted cobwebs and an inverted ashtray, neatly placed, just in reach with a stub and a pile of ash in it. What was intended as a desperate quick look lasted a good three seconds. I got off the bed, slumped on the floor and looked again, this time with a torch and a stick to poke the cardboard boxes. Still nothing. Then I explained to myself that it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I took a deep breath, and treated myself to a cup of hot chocolate.

“Did this happen again?”

Yes.

“How the hell? Why would you not take any precaution?”

It happened again on the same night. I was scared beyond wits but decided that I would not pull my hand back, no matter what. I reached for the ashtray under the bed, pinched its edge and then waited for three seconds to pick it up. At the end of the first, I felt a strange sense of calm, at the end of the second a warm feeling of acquaintance flooded the scenario, and at the end of the third, she touched my hand again. I say hands because it is the most comprehensible version; I could never confirm the same by sight. But the touch was unmistakably affectionate and feminine.

“You horny bastard.”

I wish.

“And then what happened?”

It became a habit, the last cigarette of the day, by the edge of the bed, ashtray under the bed, the stretch to fetch it and the intentional contact. There is no logic or sanity when you delve into the unknown. You keep doing it hoping that the riddle would solve itself. Ever took a Rubik’s Cube in your hand without even knowing how to solve it?

“Ummm, yeah.”

Anyway, so I continue with this habit for more time than I would like to admit. Eventually, the ritual becomes casual, less cautious, but equally gratifying. I was sure I would feel her every time I went for the ashtray under the bed. Then one night, things changed.

Tanmoy da almost coughed his lungs out. His skinny ribcage beneath the patient robes heaved for air. He almost choked on the water I passed him. He couldn’t speak for a minute and only cooed when asked if he was fine.

See how it ends. I would be smothered to death. She would be the one to take me.

“Nonsense, you are switching to fiction from reality just like that? You just coughed yourself to oblivion you fool.”

Don’t smoke for a day, you’ll see.

“So what happened that night?”

She held on to my hands, two seconds, four seconds … I panicked at five, tried to pull my hand back, she yanked at it and gave me a wrist sprain. I sat in the corner in a lump of bed sheets and pillows, looking at the edge of the bed. My hand felt numb, yet warm with the pain from the sprain. In between unsure moments of sleep and wakefulness, I could bet that she was scratching the bed under where I sat. I decide to stop indulging in this foolishness the next morning. I freaked out. Decided to change house. Stuck with Dubey from office for the next couple of days. I had shifted to a new locality by the end of that week. I did not tell this to anyone. I did not quit smoking, I just stopped smoking inside the bedroom.

A year later I was married to Sucharita and had shifted to a swanky new flat in the uptown section of the city. She was a keeper. She organized everything like a pro. I returned that day to find her in inviting attires, addressing me into the bedroom. She was the man in our relationship. I was the shy goofball. Half an hour later I was lying on by back, out of breath, sharing a smoke with Sucharita. I don’t remember the lust, the ecstasy, the joy, the stroking of my man ego et al. I asked her where to dust the ash, she pointed me below the bed. As I only stretched my arms for an ashtray below the bed, she added that she had found it in one of my older boxes and thought it was relatively new and shiny in comparison to the rest of the relics in there.

The same touch greeted me, only this time it was cold. I yelped fearing hostility. Sucharita leaned over me, picked it up on the bed and lit a new one. I felt a tight knot in my throat and soon it spread across by neck like a thousand balls of fire burning my insides. I could not scream, I was so high in pain. I passed out.

I made it a habit not to smoke on the bed and stopped Sucharita from doing it too. It was not easy to kick the habit, considering she loved to smoke. The choice was however enforced the same year, when I got diagnosed.

“Throat cancer!”

Yes.

“But what does that mean? I do not understand this. This is too close for comfort you bastard. I think it is enough for today. I am going to leave.”

You don’t want to.

His brisk tone surprised me, I froze in my chair.

You have been through my ailment, you know the details. Who the hell gets a throat cancer and then gets cured and then follows through with a skin cancer? Tell me.

“You mean the skin cancer is also … that thing ….. Her?”

I quit. I quit smoking for good. No smoking, no nicotine patch, no electronic jabberwocky. I had to quit to live. But that was my assumption. The entire house was cigarette proofed. Lighters trashed, ashtrays packed and stored away. It seemed hope would dawn eventually. Then one night, while getting back to bed from the bathroom, well, I practically gave up then and there. Whatever fight you see in me is basically her attempts to save me for herself. A clean polished ashtray and a lit cigarette, a hand rolled one, placed in the single groove invited me right under the edge of the bed. I walked to the bed like a zombie, my eyes were open and my hand was hanging by the bed when I eased on my back. I could feel the skin secrete and contract as the cigarette burned holes on my arm. I did not dare look as I passed into a fear and pain coma.

The skin cancer diagnosis was after a month or more of this torture. The burns through the night left no scars, well not until the stage was advanced and lesions started to pop out like firecrackers in Diwali. Anyway, I was sure that this eternity of pain would push me to the depths of insanity, if not now, then at least a year from now. I was sure this was an infinite loop. I was desperate. So one night I grew bolder than a dead man and snatched this from under the bed.

He reached into his bedside table drawer and pulled out the medication box, picked up a cotton roll and from the central shaft dragged out an almost full length stubbed cigarette that was lit once and was stubbed with considerable force instantaneously. The crumpled lines on it looked like dried veins and the burnt top edge looked like a crown of pain.

If I smoke this I would meet her and she will own me forever. I know, I know for sure. I don’t want to be a pet or a toy. So I am giving this to you, set me free. Let me go. I need to die. I am so tired, so tired, so tired ………

His words turned into sobs, then heavy breathing and finally, silence. I was standing up without even knowing, my right hand clutching on to a cigarette and my left the bed railing. I went blank; a nurse came from somewhere and pushed me out of the room, told me that the patient was too tired to breathe by himself and would need a machine or contraption of some sort. I sat on the visitor’s bench as chaos ensued inside the dorm. Across the glass door, it was like watching an overtly animated mime show. The flailing arms and facial expressions skewed out of focus whenever I looked away and the colour melted away at breakneck pace.

I sat there with the cigarette and my lighter, no ashtrays around.