Many of my close friends smoke. Some of them are such heavy smokers that I’m certain – as a non-smoker – I’ll outlive them. Which when it hit me I had attempted to make younger friends. Because helping them kick the butt has never worked. They have their reasons why they continue but I’m guessing they have not looked at potential insurance premiums lest they quit immediately without withdrawal symptoms. Anyway, the plan to befriend younger people fell apart the moment I saw those Starbucks-sipping prima donnas that the society calls Gen Z and heard them talking with disdain for everybody. Am I sounding like a boomer now? As of right now, I have maybe one friend who’s 4-6 years younger to me, but who I don’t hope much to be in touch with when I grow old. This has nothing to do with the point that I want to make here.

Instead, it’s about encounters with three people – people not very close to me – that made me suspect whether they’re lowkey convincing me to start smoking up.

Chronologically, the first instance was with a former manager’s manager who while trying to get me to stay with the company asked me if I smoked. I had resigned officially and he was trying to address one of the key issues I had raised, which was a lack of bonding culture within the company (and his team). He seemed to say that his team members bonded with each other during regular smoke breaks. Till then, I had accompanied a gang of smokers in the company once and where I might have looked like a fool sipping sugarcane juice while they all injected tobacco. Since I didn’t smoke, I was missing out on the corporate certified bonding exercise benefits, which, he didn’t explicitly say, could be corrected if I was accommodative. He gave up when he asked me if I played or enjoyed cricket.^[1]To his credit, I never learned whether he smoked or not. I believe he didn’t or had quit long back.

The second encounter was a more recent incident, where a colleague showed visible disappointment when I told him I didn’t smoke. He told me why that was a reason why I couldn’t bond with other people at work. For this, he also gave me an example of how he and a new member in our team had bonded so well during short smoke breaks (called “sutta” breaks in Hindi corporate slang; sutta translates to a cigarette) that they had in some cases extended them to night-long parties where tobacco’s cousin alcohol was also greatly involved. He also told me that he was trying to quit but was not able to do it completely due to these “benefits”. Was I even listening? These folks smoke so much that just talking to them (even after they’re done smoking) transfers some of the stench to you.

Then in April this year, a cousin returning from London told me during a get-together in Kerala that his boss allows him and his co-workers unlimited break time if the reason cited is smoking. For loo breaks? The boss suddenly behaves like he’s working for Amazon. The cousin, who claimed he was not much of a smoker before he moved to London, also tried to showcase other benefits of smoking at work, all while taking long drags and offering me puffs in between. Apparently, the weather there warrants the use of tobacco and similar products as there is no other quick way to “warm” oneself. How was I managing, working all these years in air conditioned offices, he seemed to ask, for which I didn’t have an answer. The benefits outweigh the risks, he seemed to say. The Mumbai weather nullifies all the air conditioning, I should’ve said.

All three encounters only seemingly tried to get me to smoke or maybe I was reading all this wrong. Smokers don’t need companions for their sutta breaks nor do non-smokers need to start smoking to bond with their colleagues or friends. As for me, all I need now is to meet former smokers so that they can start trying to get me to not start smoking.