I smoked part of a cigarette for the first time when I was five years old. My mother gave it to me. We had recently settled into the Wiltshire Lane house in West Hartford and I think she thought it would be funny to give me a puff. I might have coughed a little, but I remember enjoying it. One of my siblings even snapped a photograph of smoke billowing out of my mouth (I didn’t inhale), and the photo was proudly displayed in one of the family photo albums, but I can’t find it now.
The next day Muna and I took a walk to Liggett’s Pharmacy and I told her I wanted to buy a packet of cigarettes.
“You’re not old enough to buy cigarettes,” she said.
“But you are. You can buy them for me.”
Responsible older sister that she was, she refused to buy me the cigarettes, which made me want them all the more. I was obsessed with cigarettes as a kid. Just about everyone in my family smoked. My mother, my father, even my brothers and sisters, though they hid their smoking from my parents. I had the burden of double deception. I had to hide my smoking from my parents and my sisters and brothers.
My father mostly smoked cigars, and my mother’s cigarette brand was Kent. My parents smoked everywhere. We had ashtrays on just about every surface in the house. They smoked in the car, sometimes without rolling the windows down. They smoked in restaurants, in hotel rooms, and would always request the smoking section on airplanes, back when they had smoking sections on airplanes.
I was used to smoke all around me, but the airplane was where I really drew the line. It was bad enough being in a metal tube full of stale air for the twenty or so hours it would take to fly back and forth from Pakistan, but to have to sit next to my mother and other passengers smoking was pretty unbearable. Still, it did not stop me from wanting to smoke.
When we lived in the Stoner Drive house, my mother would often forget where she had left her cigarettes, and I would be tasked with finding them. This could take a while, since I would have to search numerous rooms.
“Are you sure you don’t remember where you left them?” I would ask.
By the time I found them, I really felt like I needed a cigarette, so I would light one up, place it down carefully, run to give my mother her packets of Kent’s. And then run back to the burning cigarette and find a bathroom where I could smoke in peace.
My preferred brand as a kid.
My sister Mimo caught me in the act once, sitting on the toilet in the bathroom off my bedroom. I fumbled to flush the cigarette down the toilet, but by now the entire bathroom was enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke.
“What are you doing?” Her eyes looked like they were about to pop out of her head.
“Um. Nothing.”
“You’re smoking!” She admonished. I thought this was hypocritical. I mean how many times had I walked in on her sitting on the toilet smoking?
Leaving Pakistan 