My Sixteen Cigarettes Towards Opulence

Preface

“Love is life and life is love”. People love different things in life for different reasons. Some love flashy cars, some love flashy wives, and some love to love the life –the essence of healthy and cautious day today living. This love which I am talking about is my love for cigarettes. In today’s world of high demanding wants and needs people tend to fire their respective tired frustrations on co colleagues, wife, children, dhobi wala, kaam wali and other related people who cannot fire back on them. But life is not such a dud that it leaves you with only the frustrations. It also holds in itself some relaxing moments – moments when you feel and self judge the right way to beat the froth out of the retreating waves. These natural pleasures (some people may think otherwise) were there since time immortal and would continue to remain hanging in the thin depleting skyline for the time’s to come. It’s for the dog fighting generation of today to understand when to admit inside their rigid mind walls this much needed opulence leading to the world of ecstasy.

I remember when I was a small toddler there were very limited wants, which used to bring happiness to my inner soul. Playing under the trees, plucking unripe mangos and mouthful of delicious grubs. The circumference of my inner soul grew with the lengthening shadows of the trees, where the past pleasures were not enough too satisfy my soul’s hunger. More and more new wishes were needed to satisfy my wants and my hunger pangs. With the meteoric increase in wishes came dreams of the forbidden land. I swam across many a time in my dreams to lay afoot in its golden sandy shores. But the shackles of my dreams forbade me to enjoy its misty terrain’s. With the tussle for some private moments in my life came the pressures of do’s and don’ts in my real life. The flavorless daily doses of wants from people who held the reins of my life used to exhaust me to such a length that many a days I had these dreamless nights of holes one atop of another leading to nowhere but more and more holes. Sometimes I thought the holes in my real life, which I had failed to digest, were making it up by coming in my dreams. I was losing my nerve gas at a rapid rate when one night when I was investigating a hole in my dream a rabbit jumped out from it. Seeing something not round was a welcoming sight to my eyes. As the rabbit hopped inside the hole I followed it. To my pleasant surprise the hole was the home of the rabbit dimly lit by a candle kept on the table. It motioned me to sit on one of the chairs and the rabbit sat on the other chair. On the table was kept a square box. On opening it I found sixteen cigarettes lined in symmetric way inside it. The rabbit said in a slow heavy voice- you can have one cigarette at a time and for each cigarette you smoke I will answer your one question. The sixteen cigarettes which I smoked the succeeding nights came up with sixteen answers to my troubling questions on life bringing opulence to my inner soul. Here I am about to open my gates of how I achieved opulence and enjoyed the trip to the forbidden land.