Smoke Becomes Me

I was fifteen when they first let me touch the pipe.

Hyderabad’s old city was sleeping that night, but I swear I could still hear the hiss of frying oil, the shouts of hawkers gone hoarse after a long day, and the clatter of bangles. Even the domes breathed, the great green-banded one above Mecca Masjid rising like a lung against the bruised sky, exhaling the heat of the day with a sharp call to prayer, stitched with wires that sagged like tired laundry. Inside our courtyard, there was no light except for the red glow of the coal.

Our work was limited to a pocket of shadow pressed between the lanes, and around it, sat the midwives with their dupattas drawn low, hands busy with cloth and clay, and eyes quick as small fires. I had seen births before, had heard that first animal cry splitting the air like a blessing, but this was different; one of the older women stepped forward and wrapped the stillborn child in a muslin bundle so small it could have been mistaken for the bunches of coriander sabzi-walla gave us for free. Amma leaned forward with a calm that made me tremble harder, and placed the bundle onto the glowing embers.  It hissed, a soft searing sound, and then it began to smoke: a thin ribbon of white lifting, astonishingly white, like the inside of a seashell.

“You will not touch the pipe yet,” she murmured.

The women leaned back, as if giving the smoke room, and reached for me: someone pressed her thumb to my forehead, someone else tapped my sternum twice, right over the soft place where breath collects before it becomes voice. “You must let it touch you.”

I watched as she guided the curl of smoke with the tilt of her chin, letting it drift like a silk ribbon, taut yet weightless, toward the clay hookah placed at the center of the courtyard.

The muslin on the embers crackled, the smoke thickening and curling toward me with unsettling purpose, as if it recognized the hollow places in my chest and wished to fill them. “Breathe only what leaves you,” Ameena-amma warned as she brushed my lips with the tip of her ring finger, dipped in rosewater and ash. I raised the pipe to my lips; the clay was cool though the coal glowed hot, my hands shaking so badly I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I knew the trick was in the exhale: a steady, measured breath that would coax the smoke out long enough that it could join the air around us instead of collapsing into silence.

The smoke began to brush my cheek like a child’s mouth searching for milk. It coiled around my throat and hovered, waiting, almost testing the weight of me.

I inhaled, just once, and my chest seized. The smoke touched the roof of my mouth, and I felt something inside me open, the way a cut opens under warm water. The hookah gurgled like a small animal learning to speak. I began to cough until my ribs ached, blood spattering on the wet floor as the pipe slipped through my fingers. The midwives hissed, but Ameena-amma caught it with the quickness of a woman who had saved fragile things all her life.

I knew in her glance that something had entered me that would never leave.

#

Ameena-amma had cared for me since I was an infant.

She said I had arrived too quietly, my mouth opening but no sound coming, like a lamp wick waiting for flame. She fed me raagi porridge with her fingers and tied a black thread around my ankle to keep wandering spirits from mistaking me for one of their own. I was to become the youngest apprentice in our mohalla, fumbling with smoke while the other girls walked streets lined with lessons and books, learning arithmetic, science, the names of governments I would never touch. I remember thinking of their voices growing feet, running through the lanes in bright, confident bursts while mine stayed rooted in the back of my throat.

The work, I had learned, wasn’t a burial, nor was it a lamentation, but a hidden dispersal, known only to women and carried inside them like a second heartbeat. It was stitched into their days as naturally as turmeric into daal or grief into marriage. The men believed we were only attending to births, never considering to ask what happened when the cry did not come.

In daylight, I was an errand-girl. I fetched turmeric from the grocer who always pressed an extra pinch into my palm as if bribing me to smile. I boiled water until my hands cracked red from steam. I carried cloth parcels to mothers who prayed for safe deliveries, and the ones who dabbed my forehead with oil when they thought I looked too thin. But by night, in that courtyard that smelled of coal and wet stone, I was a witness to what could not be spoken in daylight.

I watched the midwives move with a certainty I envied: the way they lifted the muslin bundle, the way they bent over the coals, the way they exhaled grief with the same ease with which they exhaled breath. Burial was impossible for stillborns, the elders had said. The priests turned their faces away, mumbling that even the earth rejected those who had never cried.

So, the women had to make their own ritual. They lit the coals, wrapped the child in muslin, and when its body surrendered to heat, they caught its breath before it vanished. We learned to lift it into smoke and guide it toward the hookah pipes with the same tenderness they used to guide new mothers back to sleep. We drew that smoke into our lungs and let it out again into the open air, so the world would not forget a life that had barely touched it.

And sometimes—though I swore I tried to resist—I wished for the smoke to slide past my resolve, and sink deeper than my lungs could hold, finally filling the hollow spaces left by my real amma’s absence.

#

The first mistake was mine, of course it was; longing has always carried more heat than rule, and by eighteen I had swallowed more rules than I could bear. By then, every girl in our mohalla had begun to bloom into womanhood like overwatered hibiscus, giggling behind a dupatta while secretly practicing the smiles expected of brides. They would tell me how their mothers pulled them aside to whisper instructions about husbands and households, and how to sweeten their voices and soften their shoulders. I was not allowed to practice anything at all.

“Girls like her are not meant for marriage,” the elders had said, looking at me as if I carried something contagious under my tongue. I had no dowry, no mother to bargain on my behalf, and no lineage that would not embarrass a family. The midwives needed hands, and hands were cheaper than daughters, so they took me in, and the city took the rest.

The other girls stepped into courtyards blooming with turmeric and marigolds. I remained in a courtyard filled with ash. I knew they would soon learn to fold themselves around a husband, finding their way to me only when sorrow hit their belly, while I was destined to a life of perfecting the technique of wrapping muslin around bodies that never breathed.

So, I did not expect wanting to find me. It grew inside me slowly at first, like a bruise you don’t notice until you press it. Then it deepened. Then it pulsed. Then it became a hollow that scraped the inside of my ribs every time I saw a girl my age carrying a newborn across the lane, the soft weight fitting into her arms as if her arms had been made only for that purpose.

No one told me what to do with such wanting. I allowed it to fester and ripen and call, and the smoke, hungry thing that it was, answered.

The last bundle hissed as it touched the embers, and the courtyard filled with the faint metallic scent of burning cotton. The city was going through an illness, and our nights were filled with bundles. The midwives began taking shifts, and that night I was the only one in the courtyard.

I felt something shift inside me — small, almost imperceptible, like the click of a lock slipping open. The smoke curled upward, white and thin, like a strip of moonlight peeled from the sky.

I knew the rule: you exhale, you never take it in, but longing bent my spine forward, grabbing the back of my neck as it tilted my face to the pipe. It pressed against my teeth again and again until I opened my mouth and inhaled. Once. The smoke hit my throat like a bright blade, sharp and clean. My eyes watered. My fingers tightened around the stem. It felt as though something small and startled had just run into my chest, shivering, turning, and looking for a place to hide. I should have stopped.

I could have stopped, but longing is a greedy god. I inhaled again.

Twice. This time, the smoke slid deeper, slipping between the ribs, folding itself into the empty space just below my heart. My fingers itched. Thrice. My chest fluttered in that peculiar, trembling way, the same shiver that rose when I dipped my fingers under my salwar, pressed them to the warm skin beneath. The fourth inhale swirled in my belly, grabbing my womb as if reaching for something it had no right to claim, humming with voices that were not my own.

The taste of coal and muslin lingered on my tongue as I forced myself to fall asleep, bitter and sweet, yet my pulse thumped in my throat as if the smoke had found it and was echoing it.

#

The next morning, when I was fetching turmeric from the market, a sound came out of me unbidden—a lullaby, soft as milk: Chanda hai tu, mera suraj hai tu… My throat carried it as if I had known it all along, but I had not heard it since I was a child myself. The stall-keeper froze, his fingers stained yellow, asking where I had learned it, but I could only shake my head, for it had not come from me. Later, in sleep, I muttered multiplication tables, “two times three is six, two times four is eight” with a boy’s insistence, as though a small scholar were crouched in my chest, begging me to remember what he had never been given the chance to recite. Once, when I inhaled, a girl’s voice poured out: “Ammi, put my hair in braids.” The fishmonger gasped, her rough hands clamping over my cheeks as if she were holding her own daughter, the scent of salted fish and jagged street spices clinging to her skin and filling my lungs.

I could hardly breathe, and yet I did not say a word. I felt her pulse through the press of her palms, hot and urgent, and the ghost of her daughter’s laughter brushing my hair, the soft tangle of imagined braids slipping between her fingers. She kissed my forehead before leaving, lips warm, lingering like sweat, whispering a thanks that trembled in my ears long after her body had disappeared into the alley’s heat.

The voices grew bolder, pressing against my ribs like a flock of pigeons: claws and feathers scrabbling, wings brushing against my lungs, voices cooing in urgent, fractured tongues.

I told Ameena-amma what was happening. She shook her head, heavy with sorrow. “You were warned,” she said. “The smoke is not yours to keep…” The mohalla began to whisper.

Some said I was cursed, others said I was blessed. Children avoided me at first, eyes wide, noses wrinkling at the faint tang of coal smoke and spices that clung to my hair, then crept close, drawn by the magnetic tremor in my chest. Men crossed the street, shifting uneasily on cracked stones, their sandals scraping like insects against the dust. They kept their eyes low, as if even glancing at me would tangle them in the smoke that clung to my hair.

But the mothers were braver. Or perhaps grief made them so. They came in twos and threes, dupattas pulled low, shoulders trembling, leaning into the haze of incense that curled from our courtyard like a beckoning hand. They did not want miracles. They wanted a sound: a word, a syllable, a half-breathed fragment of the children who had slipped through their fingers before they could even be named. They wanted an echo they could cradle against their chests, heavy as any newborn. They pressed my wrists with a desperation that softened into something almost like tenderness, and in that touch, in the care that trembled through them, I felt a kindness I had never been taught to expect.

They brought offerings without calling them offerings: sweets sticky with jaggery, coins kissed by the sun, shawls redolent of cooking smoke, and often nothing at all. Each time, I told myself it would be the last. Each time, I swore I would only carry the smoke, not swallow it. But when the muslin bundle met the coals and the first ribbon of white unfurled—curling and sweet, bitter and sharp—the hunger inside me rose like a tide.

I would inhale, just once, and the air would surge in, thick and living, the courtyard filling with voices not my own, thrumming against the walls of my chest as though my ribs were a drum they had once known and were learning again by touch.

#

The voices began to erupt at unpredictable times.

During the azaan, I found myself humming counter-melodies of children’s rhymes, tiny echoes threading themselves through the call to prayer, mingling with the scent of sandalwood that hung over the courtyard. At weddings, I spoke lines from future vows that would never be spoken, syllables curling like smoke above trays of marigold petals. Once, while bargaining for bangles, I blurted out, “Don’t forget me, Appa,” and the shopkeeper stared at me as if I had spat blood.

I hungered for things I had never eaten, the taste of Hyderabad pressing into my chest as I wandered through the old city streets as if drawn by invisible strings: the clatter of tinkling bicycle bells, the aroma of kebabs sizzling on skewers, chai steeping in tiny glasses, the smoke of coal-fired tandoors snaking through narrow lanes. I stopped at a stall, and my mouth remembered the taste before my tongue did, the crisp edge of the bajji, the syrupy stickiness of jalebi, and the faint sour tang of tamarind chutney left lingering on my fingers.

My feet began to move on their own accord, carrying me into homes I had never entered, kitchens where the scent of cardamom and ghee clung to the walls, where I knew exactly where the jar of cookies rested. Sometimes, I would enter a kitchen and see a mother stirring a pot of halwa, the aroma thick with cloves and cinnamon, and I would hum a lullaby that belonged to her. I would dip my fingers in warm halwa, letting the sweetness coat my tongue while the air smelled of frying samosas, biryani, and the earthy tang of the Musi River drifting through open windows. The streets, the air, the food all became cradles for the voices inside me, pressing and pulsing, guiding me toward the not-yet-born.

#

The monsoon broke open the city with water, and it was then that I crossed the line.

The women gathered, their dupattas clinging with rain, their eyes rimmed with exhaustion: another child had come stillborn, a boy with fingers so delicate they looked painted on. Ameena-amma prepared the coals. The muslin bundle hissed as it touched the embers. The smoke that rose was not thin but fat, curling in whorls that seemed to write letters against the night. I should have carried it gently, but greed had already taken root in me.

Before anyone could stop me, I pressed my lips to the stem and drew in as deeply as I could.

The smoke filled me like fire. My lungs seared. My chest swelled. And then the voices came—not one, not two, but dozens, hundreds, a cacophony of unborn lives. Ammi, braid my hair. They shouted, sang, begged, laughed, prayed, and argued. Baba, take me to Charminar. A girl asking for kohl, a boy demanding a kite, a child crying to be carried, another reciting verses half-remembered, another humming under her breath. Teacher, I know the answer. Aunty, can I have another sweet? They screamed and sang, laughed and prayed, all at once, until my body shook as if in seizure.

And then I saw it.

Not a dream, not a trick of smoke, but a market brimming with children, as solid and sun-struck as the ones who sprinted through our lanes at Eid. They darted between stalls overflowing with glass bangles and roasted peanuts, tugging at dupattas with sticky fingers, shouting over the price of falsa sherbet. They spilled from doorways, from behind stacks of turmeric, from the shadows of the Charminar itself. Laughter ricocheted off the stone arches, off the copper pots, off the tin shutters; it filled every corner of the bazaar so completely that it felt like the whole market was breathing with them.

They stared as if I were the only doorway left to them: some reached out their hands; some mouthed my name, though they had never learned it; some simply waited, patient and unbearably hopeful. They looked at me with longing so fierce it split me open from throat to navel. I collapsed to the floor, my body jerking in sharp, unnatural spasms.

#

I awoke three days later, my throat raw as if I had swallowed fire.

The world came back to me in pieces: the slow drip of water from the courtyard tap, the sweetness of rotting guava somewhere nearby, the faint ash-smell clinging to my hair. My skin felt loose, as though it had been unstitched and clumsily threaded back together. Ameena-amma sat beside me, her dupatta slipping off one shoulder, eyes red with a sadness I could not place.

She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way she once checked if I carried fever. “You lived,” she whispered. I knew that before she said it. I could feel it in the way my ribs rose with a strange, restless flutter, as though something inside me kept trying to lift out of the cage of bone. The air around my body shimmered faintly, the way it does above hot tawa in kitchens at noon. I said Amma’s name, but it came out braided with another child’s cry. I tried again, and a boy’s half-laugh curled around the syllable. The third time, a girl’s unfinished prayer split through the middle of my sentence. My voice was no longer mine.

Smoke pooled between my teeth, gathered in my throat, lifted from my shoulders in thin grey strands that wriggled as though remembering the shape of small, lost limbs. I touched my sternum and felt heat radiating beneath my skin. “You breathed them in,” she said.

She pulled her hand back as if the nearness itself burned. I was melting, not outward but inward, my body softening until it became permeable. “And now they breathe through you.”

In the hookah haze, smoke rose into the old city, curling around the green-banded domes, slipping between minarets, and weaving through tea stalls, vendors’ cries, and the sizzle of kebabs. Conversations softened without warning, as if a child’s breath had brushed them. Men paused mid-argument, unsettled by a syllable that sounded like a lost name. Women sang lullabies louder, the notes rising, folding over rooftops and narrow alleys, daring the world to hear the children they carried in their absence. The voices braided themselves into the very air of the city, curling through the lattice windows, brushing cheeks of children, rustling the hem of dupattas, and slipping into alleys where no one waited but everyone felt their passing. If you walk in the old lanes of Hyderabad, you may still hear them, and if you listen closely, you will hear me too, my voice forever fractured, forever theirs, carrying a thousand lost lullabies for a city large enough to hold them all.