He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said ‘No thanks.”Richard looked at him.”I packed it in.”"You what?”"I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That’s it. You just make the life choice.”
Richard looked up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Almost the only thing that he still liked about Gwyn was that he still smoked…Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met…
While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigaret…
If you are in Mumbai you will find the FOB at Kurla Station (Local) North side where there are a couple of women tattoo artists who sit with crude needles and local designs.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend who has got a crude 'Suryadev' tattoo on his hand. He got it for 5 rupees at a place called Ramtek near Nagpur. I had some hand in motivating him into getting it done, in fact I was going to get one too. The designs looked so neat in the design book carried by the needle guy. But the end product was anything but a sun. It looked more like an omelette. Now my goes around telling people that its an Indian tribal motif.
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