Inhale!" she commanded. "And don't cough, for God's sake."

We were on the terrace of our house. I was seven, having the first smoke of my life. My accomplices in that act were my cousin and our maid Reba.

My cousin -- I will call him Dada -- was a skeletal 10-year-old. He was convinced he was sent to this world for the sole purpose of guiding my life to glory in ways that he thought fit.

Reba was our new 20-something maid. A tall, dusky beauty, she would come up to the terrace after her shower and lean over the parapet dangerously. The boys in the carpenter shop below would miss a beat and hammer a nail right into their fingers.

And Reba would turn back and take proud steps across the terrace singing, 'Shurobhito anti-safety pin Boroline'. It was the popular Boroline ad jingle, and she had replaced 'antiseptic cream' with the more convenient 'anti-safety pin'.

That afternoon was cold, and we three were on the terrace sunning after a cold shower. After her routine experiment with the carpenter boys' adrenalin, Reba sat down, leaning against the wall.

She reached into her blouse and took out something languorously with her long fingers, her yellowish nails adorned by chipped glossy red polish. It was a cigarette, a non-filter regular Capstan.

At this point Dada tried to send me off the terrace. Despite my trust in him, I could sense a conspiracy between them. So I decided to stand my ground, solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.

Giving up on me, Dada made me take an oath of secrecy, as if they were running a cult. Reba was fairly annoyed with me.

"I hate kids," she said.

Dada roughly sensed that included him too, so he tried to impress her by looking at me disapprovingly and telling her he did not like kids either.

By then things were looking deliciously mysterious. Reba closed the terrace door. Dada carefully removed a couple of paper rolls from the extra-large pockets of his shorts.

To my horror, they were filled with tobacco. I was, by that age, quite used to peppermint cigarettes, with the tips painted red. But real tobacco? That was adult stuff.

Dada had collected the tobacco from the cigarette butts that visitors had left behind, he told me, and used paper from old newspapers to roll it.

Reba lit her cigarette. Smoky circles floated freely all around us. She helped Dada light one of his.

"Put the other one in your mouth," she told me sternly.

Dada handed me the other cigarette. I gingerly put it in my mouth. It fell to the ground.

"Put it back!" hissed Reba.

I did. I held it tightly with my lips and also my tongue. It tasted very bad and papery.

Reba lit it. Cross-eyed, I looked at the burning tip with undiluted concentration, trying to figure out what to do with it. And Reba said, "Inhale!!!"

I inhaled. It seemed like smoke had entered every pore of my body. My eyes burnt and I started coughing uncontrollably.

Reba tried to muffle the sound with her sari, and Dada, also recovering from a relatively innocuous bout of coughing, brought water. I gulped it down.

With tears in my eyes, I wanted to leave. Reba rebuked me sharply, and was going for another long draw at her cigarette when my mother banged on the door.

Our cigarettes went into a flowerpot. Reba desperately fanned the place with her sari. Dada climbed up on a stool to open the door, and Reba tried to make things normal by singing 'Main hoon, main hoon, main hoon Don!"

Mother walked in, like an inspector visiting a school. She glared at Dada, went to Reba, glared at her too, and then turned to me.

My heart stopped and I was more than willing to die.

"Open your mouth!" mother said.

I displaced my lips slightly. She said, "Wider!" I obeyed.

She put her rather prominent nose close. Then she drew herself tall and straight. Her hand came down on my cheek with great force.

She turned to go, as a tornado turns in a massive swirl, blowing away everything in its path. Then she stopped and looked into my teary eyes, coldly.

"I do not want to see you smoke again. Never ever!"

And she went down the stairs, her footsteps echoing in my ears like a giant earthquake.

Dada felt thoroughly humiliated; his august position was suddenly in question. For a long time, he could not gather himself to command me to find his spectacles and steal cookies from the pantry.

Reba was relieved from her work the next day. My mother's discovery also solved the mystery why my uncle, the only smoker in the house, was running out of his stock sooner than usual.

Reba packed her bag, and walked out haughtily, saying that anyway she did not like Capstan much and young people like her should smoke Wills.

For a long time Dada and I missed the enigma that was Reba. Dada vowed he was not to be cowed down so easily and would continue to smoke. He does that to this day.

For me, I decided a lungful of smoke was not worth all the trouble. I have not smoked since.

Reba, I heard, married a bidi-binder, and other than her preference for Wills, I guess it has been a perfect match.

Illustration: Lynette Menezes

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