Beedie

How to set your hair on fire in Bombay

Bombay. The beedie is tiny. Almost a whim.

A cigarette rolled in a tendu leaf. Each one picked by hand, sorted, sun-dried for days, softened just enough to wrap around the tobacco. Rolled by hand. Tied with a red cotton thread. An entire craft, only to end up forgotten at the bottom of a packet with no shock image and no slogan. Someone really ought to engrave it: Artisanal luxury. Not recommended by your doctor.

This image was photographed in the book “100% India” of Catherine Geel & Catherine Levy

Beautiful. That is the first word. Slender, raw, handmade. And that fearless air it gave me at twenty.

I travelled alone. A smoker. Hungry for everything. In the streets of Colaba, my first roll was waiting: beedies nestled in a printed leaf, sealed with a crooked label. In the invisible hierarchy of cigarettes: the beedie at the bottom, the Wills as a compromise, and the Dunhill, rare, stolen from another world’s comfort on days of raiding the well-heeled crowd’s pockets.

That day, I chose the bottom rung.

I sit in the gardens of Malabar Hill. Twenty years old. A stranger, alone, a poor man’s cigarette in hand, surrounded by families in their Sunday best. Incongruous. And delicious.

Malabar Hill - Hanging Gardens, Bombay 1985

Lighting a beedie is a small battle. Too thin, too short, it goes for your hair first. It dies the moment you neglect it, forcing you to start again. Each relight is the same scene: you bring the flame close, it wakes with a start, a capricious spark, then a fleeting one. It stings the lips, tickles the tongue, scratches the throat. Sometimes you wonder whether it is actually tobacco burning at all. So you draw, fast, hard, just to steal a few more seconds of life from it. Clumsy as I was, I looked less like someone having a cigarette and more like someone struggling to keep a tiny campfire to keep the insects at bay.

I can still see the salt air of the Arabian Sea. The heavy scent of flowers. The golden light along the paths. Around me, indifferent conversations. In my hand, a fragile, stubborn little cylinder that refused to burn like anything else.

It went out the way it had lived: capricious, tiny, pointless. And yet capable of branding a memory into my mind like a hot iron.