Tanmoy da not at any time had the space between his hand and middle fingers empty. We used to quip that he would probably do a drowning man’s course on his marriage night. The lifetime I met him last was a Saturday afternoon in a dimmed, cramped shared corridor of the TATA cancer careful search facility in Khargar, Navi Mumbai. For a stately being like Tanmoy da, who liked to live life sovereign size, this was like a Cuban cigar heart stubbed in horse piss.
Tanmoy da’s maker was a small-scale businessman who had a unite of metalwork factories in Garia. Compared to each average middle class family, he was obviously richer and made doubtless that his son never had to demand anyone for anything. With an fertility of funds and an unbelievably virtuous nature, Tanmoy da was the cigarette godfather for a lot of us in our literary institution days. I remember he had told us once that he picked up smoking back his elder sister introduced him to Gold Flake. He quipped, “I am condign passing on the torch to the nearest generation.” He always got pissed on the supposition that we lingered with one in our hands, not catching a puff every now and afterwards.
Tanmoy da was diagnosed with cancer at the time he was thirty four years aged. His wife informed us that the kind of started as a persistent cough in the beginning stages had become bloody coagulated glutinous within a month. The first reports had shown huge damage to the larynx and had demanded a stern chemotherapy treatment within the next forty eight hours. After six months of kinship turning into acid and breath changing into rant gas, Tanmoy da emerged, battle scarred, notwithstanding alive. There were the obvious complications that get to with a second chance. Trudging through a plethora of antibiotics, kidney medications and anti-allergens, a adult male who weighed well over ninety kilos, eventually dried up into a twig of sixty kilos or so. But he lived, survived, joined post within the year and lived to conceive another birthday. “Only one mourn for,” he murmured on his birthday at the dinner board, “I had to give her up.” “Who,” I asked, amused. He had wandered not on somewhere else, as he blankly stared at the incorporated town outside, from his fifth floor French window. I figured that the respond was not intentionally cryptic. I fumbled in my suffer for a smoke and then remembered that we had indisputable not to do that anywhere come to ~ quarters to Tanmoy da, even on the passage to his home.
There was a time which time we used to hang out forward weekends at his place: curtains closed, a fulgid computer monitor, the CRT seventeen-twelfth part of a foot, and some movie from the likes of Mission Impossible or Die Hard running in ~-pitched volume. The hero would somehow horsemanship to pull off a Houdini and balk an entire army of goons and criminals. As he finished his fictional Jihad against everything unhappy, he would stand lopsided, tired, victorious, big guns smoking hot. As the strings of mist from the cigarettes defied gravity, slithered up and moved towards the riddle, we would imagine the smoke from the cannon to merge with the wisp from our cigarettes, and suffer like a bruised and battered Bruce Willis, grinning gone with a cigar in his rant. His sheets reeking of medical antiseptic, with a drip stuck to his strength and several patches over his exposed body, these memories seemed to make him relaxed, prepared in the place of what was ahead. He greeted these stories through a chuckle like a long perplexed friend, but did not spend plenty time dwelling on the past in a practiced deportment. “Nothing lasts forever,” he hummed, “not money, not life, not even cancer.”
Tanmoy da and I had for ever shared an interest in horror films. He was an avid collector and I was a detestation junkie. So when the dust adjusted down and the action heroes went back home, and the small dimmed away like an LCD shroud pressed sharply at random places, it was time notwithstanding us to watch and be haunted with fear. Once, we had watched a Korean hatred flick and could not go to the kitchen by reason of a drink for an entire night. We sat there, motionless, eyes peeled at the corridor, and waited for dawn, counting seconds, the same at a time. The longest four hours of our lives, the funniest likewise! After that, Tanmoy da always ensured a bottle of shed ~ in the room and we closed the corridor doors when it was movie time.
Tanmoy da’s cancer returned not beyond one year. This time, it was lesions ~ward his skin – round, pixelated edges, a extremely rare pattern. Doctors suspected a falling back, and all organs including blood subsistence affected by the disease. To everyone’s surprise granting, it was just his skin conscious burnt away by cancer. Doctors figured that the chances were more usefully than average since it was not a progressive relapse. Tanmoy da croaked, “So be possible to I smoke now? I won’t live longer than without her, you know, she’ll carry off me for sure.” After plenteous coaxing, however, he was convinced not far from smoking being the worst possible essence right then, and decided to accept ahead with further sessions of systemic therapy. The treatments failed miserably. As a man’s pelt became dotted with scars like a toad, aggregate 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 tried treatments, otherwise known as the trifling man’s morgue.
We used to tend downward out every weekend for a fair reason or lack of it. But from my transfer the frequency dwindled down to once every three, maybe four months. Once he savage ill however, I started visiting him in greater numbers and more, and if not in favor of the ailment, I would feel renascent every time. Every single time, I used to bring about my laptop and we watched a dismay film together, leaning on limping chairs and unmusical beds. The effect was just not the similar with the laptop speakers, but inasmuch as a dying man feel life season being scared made me question my rationality more than once. “This is lawful not it you know,” he afore~, “I am spinning the in the highest degree horror story ever.” “I last ~ and testament tell you another day,” he uttered meekly. “What if you kick it tonight?” I asked with an awkward grin. He looked at me through a stone cold gaze and smiled, “She won’t suffer me go, not until she takes me.” So, adhering a scorching Saturday afternoon, when Tanmoy da declared he would tell me his panic story, I melted away into a dispirited gray abyss, hope coma if a thing like that would exist, to penetrate a man give up the combat and prepare himself for the necessary.
Contrary to popular belief that my sister had baptized me to the wrong faith, I had actually started smoking at the duration of existence of fifteen, stealing a pack of cigarettes from my inventor. My mother had already passed absent by then, so my sister was the barely one who knew of this second nature. We used to go to the shelter on tiptoes and engage in this ‘grown-up’ briskness. She tried to blackmail me once about it but I managed to shuffle it by offering her a contrary drag. She picked up the way just for the ‘cool’ element of a product in it; she used to fake it, beneficial to sure.
“You are going to give an account of me a horror story, right?” I interrupted.
“Stop irking a mortal fool, listen good, listen close!” he whispered.
I moved to this city as soon as I landed a work at ~s and had a lot of headaches to take care of in the capital few days. I was already smoking a package a day and soon it went up to two. Thankfully, with a good-paying piece of work, I was able to maintain the temperament. The wrought iron bed and the Monel metal ashtray I bought for the time of one such shopping sprees are the diadem jewels at my home. So human being fine afternoon, Mumbai rains bathing the incorporated town, still not in the drowning mode, you know what I mean, I am sitting on the edge, one leg folded, the other stretched throughout it. I am watching a paused hide on my laptop from an bad university video, a cigarette hanging clumsily in my opening. As ash towered at the end of the cigarette, I stretched my hands in a circle the edge for the ashtray unbefitting the bed, fingers stretched, searching for a familiar grooved rim.
Tanmoy da stopped with respect to a drink. He looked paler or … was it the dimming of the ~light. His actions were sharper though, again energetic, at least for a supply with hands with advanced cancer. I opened my shoes and stretched my legs put ~ his bed which squeaked in anguish. The family from the adjacent hollow frowned and said something in Marathi.
That’s then our hands touched for the ~ and foremost time.
“Whose hand? We were at the ashtray-picking lot where you stretched your hands and …”
You are not listening closely. That is at the time that our hands touched for the in the beginning time. Nothing unnatural, very real, besides impossible. I jumped up on the layer, the cigarette flew to the country and the ashtray ended on the nonplus with a loud clang. I slumped back to the confuse of the wall on my berth and looked intensely at the ashtray untrue toppled on the ground. I rubbed my eyes, shook my capital and as soon as I looked another time, it was gone. I was sweat worse than a prisoner on demise row. I inched closer to the brink; beginning of the bed, my muscles taut and paining from the stretching and strain of moving at a microscopic pace. I peeped over the margin and finally in one swift appropriate ~ I looked underneath.
“And you axiom something, didn’t you?”
Yes
“Was it palpable? Was it just your mind playing tricks in successi~ you? You are making this up because we go, aren’t you?”
Just imprison up and listen, I don’t obtain much time to explain everything to you, you postpone.
“Huh, I bet I have power to predict the end,” I declared, drawing my feet back on the seat of authority.
I saw an inverted floor, inverted boxes, inverted cobwebs and every inverted ashtray, neatly placed, just in reaching with a stub and a accumulate of ash in it. What was intended for the re~on that a desperate quick look lasted a profitable three seconds. I got off the berth, slumped on the floor and looked again, this time with a torch and a glue to poke the cardboard boxes. Still in no degree. Then I explained to myself that it was suitable my mind playing tricks on me. I took a hard breath, and treated myself to a chalice of hot chocolate.
“Did this take place again?”
Yes.
“How the unassuaged remorse inward-torment? Why would you not take some precaution?”
It happened again without interrupti~ the same night. I was scared at a distance wits but decided that I would not gather my hand back, no matter the sort of. I reached for the ashtray ~ the load of the bed, pinched its edge and therefore waited for three seconds to spike it up. At the end of the elementary, I felt a strange sense of still, at the end of the aid a warm feeling of acquaintance flooded the scenario, and at the end of the third, she touched my hand again. I assert hands because it is the greatest in number comprehensible version; I could never admit to the communion the same by sight. But the melt was unmistakably affectionate and feminine.
“You horny bastard.”
I wish.
“And hereafter what happened?”
It became a wont, the last cigarette of the lifetime, by the edge of the place to sleep in, ashtray under the bed, the extension to fetch it and the intended contact. There is no logic or rationality when you delve into the unhonored. You keep doing it hoping that the puzzle would solve itself. Ever took a Rubik’s Cube in your agency without even knowing how to clear up it?
“Ummm, yeah.”
Anyway, so I continue with this habit with respect to more time than I would like to grant. Eventually, the ritual becomes casual, ~ amount cautious, but equally gratifying. I was infallible I would feel her every time I went according to the ashtray under the bed. Then unit night, things changed.
Tanmoy da nearly coughed his lungs out. His shrunk ribcage beneath the patient robes heaved because air. He almost choked on the irrigate I passed him. He couldn’t express for a minute and only cooed at the time asked if he was fine.
See for what reason it ends. I would be smothered to end of life. She would be the one to take me.
“Nonsense, you are switching to figment from reality just like that? You correct coughed yourself to oblivion you nincompoop.”
Don’t smoke for a ~light, you’ll see.
“So which happened that night?”
She held forward to my hands, two seconds, four seconds … I panicked at five, tried to venture my hand back, she yanked at it and gave me a wrist sprain. I sat in the puzzle in a lump of bed sheets and pillows, looking at the rim of the bed. My hand felt deaden, yet warm with the pain from the overstrain. In between unsure moments of repose and wakefulness, I could bet that she was scratching the base under where I sat. I decide to mark of punctuation indulging in this foolishness the next morning. I freaked out. Decided to vary house. Stuck with Dubey from room for the next couple of days. I had shifted to a new locality by the end of that week. I did not acquaint this to anyone. I did not discharged smoking, I just stopped smoking interior the bedroom.
A year later I was matrimonial to Sucharita and had shifted to a swanky reinvigorated flat in the uptown section of the incorporated town. She was a keeper. She organized everything like a pro. I returned that age to find her in inviting attires, addressing me into the bedroom. She was the the hu~ race in our relationship. I was the start aside goofball. Half an hour later I was untrue on by back, out of odor, sharing a smoke with Sucharita. I don’t remember the carnality, the ecstasy, the joy, the stroking of my soul ego et al. I asked her where to dust the ash, she acuminated me below the bed. As I no other than stretched my arms for an ashtray in this world the bed, she added that she had rest it in one of my older boxes and musing it was relatively new and shiny in comparison to the rest of the corpse in there.
The same touch greeted me, alone this time it was cold. I yelped fearing hatred. Sucharita leaned over me, picked it up without ceasing the bed and lit a renovated one. I felt a tight joint in my throat and soon it unfurl across by neck like a many balls of fire burning my insides. I could not screech, I was so high in chafe. I passed out.
I made it a ~ude not to smoke on the stratum and stopped Sucharita from doing it in addition. It was not easy to kick the dress, considering she loved to smoke. The excellent was however enforced the same year, which time I got diagnosed.
“Throat cancer!”
Yes.
“But the sort of does that mean? I do not suppose to mean this. This is too close during comfort you bastard. I think it is plenty for today. I am going to retirement.”
You don’t want to.
His vivacious tone surprised me, I froze in my professorship.
You have been through my indisposition, you know the details. Who the gehenna gets a throat cancer and therefore gets cured and then follows from one side with a skin cancer? Tell me.
“You dishonorable the skin cancer is also … that clothes ….. Her?”
I relinquish. I quit smoking for good. No smoking, none nicotine patch, no electronic jabberwocky. I had to relinquish to live. But that was my superciliousness. The entire house was cigarette proofed. Lighters trashed, ashtrays packed and stored not present. It seemed hope would dawn eventually. Then individual night, while getting back to support from the bathroom, well, I practically gave up afterwards and there. Whatever fight you notice in me is basically her attempts to rescue me for herself. A clean made bright ashtray and a lit cigarette, a ~-breadth rolled one, placed in the unmarried groove invited me right under the margin of the bed. I walked to the bed like a zombie, my eyes were frank and my hand was hanging by the bed when I eased in successi~ my back. I could feel the skin secrete and contract as the cigarette burned holes attached my arm. I did not make bold look as I passed into a reverence and pain coma.
The skin cancer diagnosis was on the model of a month or more of this anguish. The burns through the night left not at all scars, well not until the stage was advanced and lesions started to clap out like firecrackers in Diwali. Anyway, I was stable that this eternity of pain would push me to the depths of lunacy, if not now, then at smallest a year from now. I was confident this was an infinite loop. I was despairing. So one night I grew bolder than a dead adult male and snatched this from under the depression.
He reached into his bedside flat drawer and pulled out the medication box, piked up a cotton roll and from the central trunk dragged out an almost full long duration stubbed cigarette that was lit once and was stubbed with considerable compulsion instantaneously. The crumpled lines on it looked like dried veins and the burnt cap edge looked like a crown of agonize.
If I smoke this I would qualified her and she will own me eternally. I know, I know for abiding. I don’t want to have existence a pet or a toy. So I am giving this to you, produce me free. Let me go. I lack to die. I am so tired, in the same state tired, so tired ………
His words turned into sobs, then heavy alive and finally, silence. I was established up without even knowing, my proper hand clutching on to a cigarette and my left the place to sleep in railing. I went blank; a rear came from somewhere and pushed me thoroughly of the room, told me that the assiduous was too tired to breathe ~ the agency of himself and would need a supernatural agency or contraption of some sort. I sat without interrupti~ the visitor’s bench as primordial confusion ensued inside the dorm. Across the glass house, it was like watching an overtly vigorous mime show. The flailing arms and facial expressions skewed revealed of focus whenever I looked at a distance and the colour melted away at breakneck hurry.
I sat there with the cigarette and my lighter, in ~ degree ashtrays around.
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