Cigarettes, Smog, and Chal Chalan

The first time I chanced upon Casablanca was at 16—I was brooding, egotistical, and, frankly, stressed by the O-Level workload (sweet summer child). It had been six years since my mother and I had uprooted our quaint two-bedroom, rented apartment and moved in with my grandmother, in light of my grandfather’s death. Watching Bogart smoke a cigarette tucked into a tight-lipped smile and chuff away as he sombrely confessed his love awoke something in me. Quietly, I slipped into the guest bedroom (occupied by my father on the weekends) and slipped out two cigarettes from his box he left behind in the drawer. It was exhilarating to hold something so impure so close to my form, as if I was breaking the bounds of what made me sacred—a ‘good’ daughter. In my fairy-light-strung room I smoked the two cigarettes and discarded the butts in my storeroom.

It was a week later, when my mother cleaned out the storeroom, that she produced the paraphernalia, aghast, and shook me by the arm as she yelled: “How dare you? Don’t you know good women don’t do this? Do you know what kind of women do this? Women with a bad chal chalan! Characterless!” It was a jarring moment that sticks to my memory like molasses; it was the first time I realized my acts of rebellion, no matter how small, would have dire consequences—familial shame, dissolution of honour, sharp like a knife. My family’s honour was the length of a cigarette.

So, I stayed straight after that—always good, always kind, always docile. I smoked again as a freshman in university. I was terrified of my mother finding out her now 19-year-old daughter smoked when she wanted to, often in the company of friends or at night, stuck on the frigid bathroom floor in cold, cold December—exhaust running on full speed to mask the scent. If she did realise it, she didn’t say anything about the cans of air freshener I kept ordering. My mother found me smoking, crouched on the bathroom floor one night. It was in the same guest bedroom. 2:00 a.m. She was horrified. My father was called, my friends were termed ‘bad company,’ and I was chastised by emotional tears and badgering. My father cried at the foot of my bed as I lay limp in the bed I had made for myself. “I don’t understand—is it because I wasn’t around? You’ve become a nightmare.” I finally spoke, carefully chewing each word before spitting it out.

“What would you tell your son? I did everything I was supposed to, all this time. Even more. What would you tell a son who was a reaper for all you had sown?” He got up and left at that, silent. That night I heard my father and mother whisper across the hall, in quiet collusion of my sins. The next time he visited, he walked into the living room and tossed me a pack of menthols. “Got them for you on the way,” he said to me with a nod. “Your grandmother used to smoke the hookah in the village while having political banter with her friends, apparently.” It was as if they had come to an acceptance, mutual, that I was someone eccentric so the only way to deal with me was to go with my whims.

Academia, yes. Marriage, no—PhDs are a more lucrative road to depression. You have a 10:00 p.m. curfew but you’re also in your 20s, so dates are a-OK as long as the details are spilled in the living room later. Wear whatever you want to, write whatever you want to, associate with people who match your intellect, and don’t roam around without giving us a call. We are your friends, but not really. It was a delicate tipping scale of dos and don’ts that always came with a sly, “Ask your friends how their parents are. Do they smoke? Do they go out whenever? Do they wear those modern tops? Be grateful.” I didn’t know how to say, “Sometimes I don’t want a friend. I just want a mother. My rebellion is what slowly ground away at your defences till this is what I created—still suffocating but a longer road to my demise. Just like cigarettes. I served you my entire life to have the ‘freedom’ you now hold over me. I am not free if it comes with the illusion of choice.” Whenever a friend would repeat the same sentiment, gushing at my luck of having ‘understanding’ parents, I would laugh quietly. I did not choose this. I was given this like Adam and Eve, kicked from heaven and given an abode on earth. What choice did they have after their transgression? I discussed it with a friend who understood better: When your father is a spectre haunting your periphery and your mother crowds against it, blinding you, it is easier to understand. As we walked on the dimly lit campus, chai in hand, she said, “They don’t get it, do they? They won’t, they don’t understand the dichotomy of a mother who sees you as her lost childhood self. Having had no one to save her, she will hold onto you so tight it will suffocate you.”

Lahore, in the thirteen years of my adolescence spent here, is quite similar. The heat is sweltering in a manner that makes your knees buckle and your breath come out coated in vapour: a cartoon summer with an invisible thermometer in the sky on the verge of bursting. The cold sneaks into your bones and takes a stab at the marrow, while the city lights look like floating bog spirits in the foggy nights. As the temperature falls lower, a strange grey matter swoops in, long tendrils and smoky scent, oily and coating your throat with its scheming tentacles till your lungs feel raw. Smog, so characteristic of the city. The urban sprawl crawls forward like an incessant poison, dividing the city into parts that contrast so starkly that it makes you ill. You are exiled here. You live here. These are concentric circles. Jinnay Lahore nai wekhya ho jamya ee nahee. (The one who hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t been born.) I digress: This city is haunted. It settles into your bones, no matter how far you stray, like a siren calling its next victim into the jagged rocks in the ocean. Jera aithay aa gyaa ho kadday labya ee nahee. (The one that arrives here will never find himself again.)

I remember walking into class, at thirteen—a small-town child with a heavily accented English and a Punjabi candour tainting her words. My need to curse those who made fun of me came along. “Lakh di laanat (A thousand curses on you)!” I was met with frowns and mumbled breaths of, “What a poorly raised child. So backwards, no?” One memory defined Lahore for me. It was October, the school year had just started. The teacher walked in, her red dress morphing into shapes that were fascinating as she moved across the room in a sprightly, agile manner. Her eyes stopped on me. “You, what is your name?”

I stood up. “Sa-ra. Jav-eeed,” I said out loud, bouncing on my heels and smiling. Her face was marred by a frown almost instantaneously. “That is not how you say your name. What are you? Some third-class villager? You’re in Lahore now, in an elite institution, even if it is on a scholarship. Say it with me.” She repeated my name with perfect enunciation, not sounding like I did at all. Ten times, she made me say my name out loud, my voice growing feeble with each turn. I learned it soon after—Lahore only loves you till you fit its mould.

Otherwise it chews you and spits you out. Much like my mother, it would only love me under an illusionary guise. Like a father, its ghost would skirt along in my periphery, always out of reach. Is that not what parents do? Love you and tear you apart in ways you can never reconcile with, under the pretence of it being for your own good? I never bothered asking the city or the mother, What if I was not good enough? Would you look at me with that same thinly veiled disgust? Like a bruise thrumming under the skin, as if I was not human but an apple going bad, I allowed the big words to seep under my skin till I felt distended, engorged. About to burst apart at the seams.

It was not until university rolled around that it struck me: Lahore, too, had a side of it that was exalted, loved, yet still looked at in a strange, wary manner. The Androon (Inner) Walled City, with its towering minarets and streets so narrow the people living there term it a one-way path to marriage—you can’t cross it without grazing another. Full of spiraling pathways that stay as an emblem to its grandeur, but also its desecration. Think of it. The grand city, with its towering, terracotta mosques. The underground hamams, fortresses that wind along from the Mughal era, to the Sikh conquest. The citadels where the pigeons roost, letting out guttural oogh-oogh-ooghs as you step in to pray. I prayed once, a very long time ago, in the mosque—I got what I wanted. Many came to get what they wanted, too, it seemed; the walls were pock-marked with graffiti. ‘Please wed me to Hamza. Nimra. I love him. 2002,’ one said. Or the shrine of Dataa Sahib, the one that feeds the poor and destitute and houses the spirits broken by the city on its footpaths. Bibi Pak Daman, the chaste daughter of Maula Ali who prayed for God to save her and was swallowed whole by the ground—devotees turn up barefoot to walk across the pathways, mumbling prayers under their breath, often shrouded in black.

I walked across Mall Road connecting the Lahore Museum, with its frankly mismanaged displays, to the National College of Arts on a frigid February morning, looking at the art. The cold seeped in, even through the blood red of my Kashmiri pheran. I was met with the classic colonial structures that marked the British conquest of the city. I walked and walked, across this mishmash of time and cultural icons, realising Lahore had set like a dying sun into my heart. Away from the gentrification, the old still existed: revered, yet still left to crumble into itself like Usher’s house. Was it a negation of history, or was it an attempt to slither closer to that enunciation? The one that had ruined my own name for me? Lahore had welcomed many and spat them out in the same breath—then who was I to complain? Many of the greats lay buried in its ever-growing contours. The national poet, Iqbal, in a small shrine. Faiz, the socialist revolutionary and poet who returned to the city after the brutal military dictatorship exiled him. Manto, the prolific prose writer, too, who wanted his epitaph to say: Under tons of earth he lies, wondering who of the two is the greater short story writer: God or he.

With the quiet acceptance of it all came the realization: My cigarettes, Lahore with its smog that chokes you all winter, and my chal chalan (character) had one striking similarity. Very physical manifestations of a cruel, egregious sociocultural landscape, they all drove me toward an early death. They talk so much about birth and Lahore in all their euphemisms, yet never about death. I wonder if it is because the ones who die in Lahore are so innumerable that they fade into some facet of the city instead of an afterlife. Will I roam Charing Cross after I am dead? A study in the violence of the city that marked the surge in terrorism during the 2000s, or in how many arrive here looking for prospects but never leave.

There is no conclusion to this query. I will not wake up one day and find out that cigarettes miraculously heal instead of kill, or smoking one is not a show of a woman’s character in Pakistan. I will not wake up one day to find out the city air is clean to breathe, and the landscape is not covered with tendrils of smoke as soon as October knocks. Even as I struggle toward it, carrying posters high every Women’s March, as journalists knock microphones into my face and scream, “Tell us about your poster. Does your family know you are here?” I doubt I will live to see ‘character’ not be a word that describes the worth of a woman here, attached to how her ‘goodness’ makes her an exchangeable commodity. Father to husband to son, to her grave. I will probably never be able to understand why parents do what they do—sink their fangs into your carotid and spit the blood out—it is too rotten for them. Reminds them too much of themselves. And maybe that is all that matters—this lack of understanding among tendrils of smoke, this city, and self.

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Sara Javed is an author from Lahore, Pakistan. She studies English Literature at Kinnaird. She has written on art and culture for The Friday Times and does radio, theatre and public speaking. She won the Daud Kamal Award in 2018.