There was a time when I never thought I would become a smoker.
Until I was 21, smoking and drinking had simply never been part of my life. I was not interested in either, nor did I feel the need to join in because others were doing it. In fact, long before I ever touched a cigarette, I had written about why I had never been fond of alcohol and why I had chosen to stay away from it.
Life has a way of taking us places we never imagined we would go.
When I began travelling to other countries, I was introduced to new cultures and people who lived differently from me and belonged to social circles very different from my own. Those experiences broadened my thinking and enriched my understanding of the world. They also exposed me to choices and situations that were new to me.
One of them was smoking.
I do not look back on that period with either pride or regret. It is simply part of my journey. I write about it to explain how someone who never intended to become a smoker could become one, remain one for years and eventually quit.
I am not writing to glorify smoking or to judge those who smoke. I am writing as someone who knows first-hand how a habit can begin, and I hope others can take something positive from my experience.
When I arrived in South Africa at the age of 21, I entered a world very different from the one I knew.
I had never been particularly interested in smoking. It was simply not for me. I did not hate smokers or judge them, but I certainly never imagined that I would become one.
South Africa changed my surroundings, and slowly, it changed my thinking.
What first attracted my attention was how common smoking was. It did not seem limited to a particular class, race, profession or age. It crossed all those boundaries. Whether someone was white or non-white, male or female, young or old, rich or poor, smoking seemed to belong to everyone.
It was part of celebrations and moments of sadness. People smoked during conversations, during breaks, after work and in moments of stress. Some smoked to relax. Others smoked to relieve tension. For almost every occasion and every mood, there seemed to be a cigarette.
As a young man trying to understand this new world, I quietly observed it. Day after day, those images became part of my surroundings and, without me realising it, began to influence the way I thought.
Looking back, I can see how my psychology slowly changed. I began to associate smoking with personality. Whenever I saw well-dressed, confident or attractive people with cigarettes in their hands, my mind created an association: smoking made them look cool.
I began to feel that I was missing something they had. It was not really the cigarette that fascinated me. It was the image I had attached to it.
The influence was not limited to strangers. Some of the Nepali friends I was closest to, including Raj brother, were smokers. They were good people and I enjoyed their company. Smoking was therefore part of the environment around me, and slowly it began to feel normal.
No one forced me to smoke. No one pressured me into it. But when something is constantly around us, it can gradually become normal.
There was another influence I did not think much about at the time.
At work, smokers would often take five-minute breaks, sometimes every hour. They would use those breaks to relax, chat with colleagues, laugh and briefly escape the boredom of work. As a non-smoker, I remained at my desk until they returned, seemingly refreshed.
It sometimes felt as though I was missing out on something.
These were small things, but together they influenced me. The environment around me gradually conditioned me to believe that smoking was somehow special.
Today, I know that a cigarette could never give anyone personality. But at the time, my young mind had begun to believe that it could.
That conditioning eventually led me to make a decision that would change the course of my life.
Raj brother and I worked for the same employer, although we managed different shops. After work, I would often meet a few Nepali friends before going home.
Raj brother would usually buy six small bottles of beer for the group. I would have a bottle of Coke or some fruit juice and enjoy the company of my friends. Cigarettes were always part of the gathering.
I was not drinking or smoking, but my mind had already been conditioned.
After weeks of seeing people smoke in the streets, at work, in restaurants, at celebrations and during stressful moments, I had begun to believe that smoking was somehow connected to personality. Somewhere in my mind, I had started to believe that I was missing something.
One evening, as we sat together, curiosity got the better of me.
“I want to know what it feels like to smoke,” I said.
Nobody criticised me or tried to argue with me. I had simply said what was on my mind.
Raj brother smiled, handed me a cigarette and said, “Go ahead, give it a try.”
I held a cigarette for the first time in my life.
I lit it clumsily and tried to imitate what I had seen so many people do before me. I took a puff and almost immediately began coughing uncontrollably.
The smoke burned my throat and lungs. My eyes watered and I could barely catch my breath. Everyone laughed while I wondered why millions of people around the world voluntarily subjected themselves to something so unpleasant.
If someone had told me then that this miserable first puff would eventually become a habit, I would not have believed them.
But bad habits do not usually arrive all at once.
The next day, I took another puff. A day later, perhaps two.
One puff became two. Two became three. Three became half a cigarette. Eventually, half a cigarette became a whole one.
For a long time, I did not even buy cigarettes. I would take a puff from Raj brother or one of my other friends whenever we met after work. Because I was not smoking regularly, I convinced myself it was harmless.
Looking back, I understand how easily a habit can develop. It does not always begin with a conscious decision. Sometimes it grows quietly through repetition until we realise that we are no longer making the choice we thought we were making.
There was no particular day when I decided to become a smoker. There was no dramatic event, emotional crisis or unbearable pressure that pushed me towards cigarettes.
I was simply becoming one.
Fortunately, it did not stay that way forever.
As time passed, I began questioning the associations I had created around smoking. The more I questioned them, the more I began to see how little they had to do with reality.
I started asking myself a simple question:
What was I smoking for?
When I first experimented with cigarettes, I had somehow imagined that smoking might help me relax. Perhaps, subconsciously, I thought it could help me think better, cope with difficult moments or make me feel more confident and composed.
Eventually, I began to see the difference between the power I had imagined a cigarette possessed and the power it actually had.
It had none.
What made me smoke was not that cigarettes made me happy. The reality was almost the opposite. They made me cough, irritated my throat and lungs and made my eyes water.
But the first unpleasant experience was not what made me stop. By then, the habit had already taken hold.
Then I began to ask myself another question.
Why had I become so dependent on a cigarette when what I actually needed in difficult moments was a person? When I am in pain, don’t I need someone to talk to? When I am stressed, don’t I need someone to listen? When I am confused, don’t I need someone to advise me? When I am struggling, don’t I need someone to help me?
A cigarette could do none of those things.
It could not listen to me, understand me, advise me or reassure me that everything would be all right. Yet I had somehow convinced myself that it could make me feel better.
That was when I began to understand something important.
Sometimes we believe in something not because it is true, but because we have convinced ourselves that it is.
I had conditioned myself to believe that a cigarette could make me feel better. Once I began questioning that belief, the cigarette began to lose its hold over me.
There was no dramatic morning when I woke up after hearing shocking news and decided never to smoke again. No doctor stood before me and told me I had to quit immediately. I did not make a grand promise to myself.
I simply began to understand that cigarettes were doing nothing positive for me.
They were not healing my pain. They were not making me stronger or more creative. They were not solving my problems or giving me personality.
The personality I had imagined I was gaining from smoking was something I already possessed, or something I could develop through my actions, confidence, work and relationships.
A cigarette could never give me that. So, slowly and almost quietly, I quit.
That is perhaps the most interesting part of my experience with smoking. Neither the beginning nor the end was dramatic.
I did not crush my final cigarette, throw away a packet and declare, “That’s it. No more.”
I simply began reducing the number of cigarettes I smoked.
When I felt the urge, sometimes I would smoke. But I also began paying closer attention to what I was feeling and asking myself why I wanted a cigarette.
Sometimes I gave in. Sometimes I did not.
Gradually, I began ignoring the cravings. Whenever the urge came, I reminded myself of what I had already understood. A cigarette was not going to heal my pain, remove my stress, make me more creative or solve my problems.
So why should I depend on it?
I did not declare war on the cigarette. I did not fight myself. I simply kept reminding myself that I was stronger than the habit I had unknowingly created. Gradually, the number of cigarettes I smoked decreased.
Then the occasions on which I smoked became fewer. Then the cravings began to disappear. And slowly, smoking disappeared from my life as quietly as it had entered it. That is how I quit.
Not with a final puff. Not with a dramatic promise. Not with a date marked on a calendar.
I kept reducing, questioning, resisting and reminding myself that I did not need it.
Until one day, I realised something very simple. I had stopped smoking.
Perhaps that is the most important thing I learned from my relationship with cigarettes. I did not quit because I had suddenly become a different person. I quit because the person I already was understood that I did not need a cigarette to become the person I wanted to be.
The habit began with a single puff.
But it ended not with a single decision, but with many small decisions to say:
I don’t need this.
