If Bachchan perfected the art of making the cigarette a bastion of gruff, lonely masculinity, one that Vikram Rathore embodies by elevating it to a more obvious, class-agnostic, stylistic choice, Sidhant Gupta made of it a tender plaything. When we first see Jay Khanna (Gupta) in Jubilee, he is dancing with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a hat he keeps shuffling in place, with a smile that invokes the ghost of Shashi Kapoor’s youth. When he is speaking to Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana), who rescues him from the clutches of the railway police, he rattles off his resume, “Backstage, costume, set design … acting,” with a cigarette jutting out of his face, his words made that much softer by it. There is something extraordinarily, immediately charming about this character and his cigarette, the way he, initially, tends to hold it between his middle finger and thumb, with his index finger as a protective hood; the way, with fame and money, he dangles it between index finger and middle finger.
The Romance of Smoking
Then, there is what a cigarette does to the silences of a scene. A cigarette is a measure of time. How long does it take for it to ash closest to the finger, at which point its heat singes the skin — of the finger, of the lip? That is the length of time you can extend. A cigarette after a date; after sex; with a friend; a colleague downstairs. It is saying, how do I extend time with you without filling it with things, words, labour? Just smoke, and some silence.
In cinema, to see characters smoke is to see them either extend time, allowing for “nothingness” in the narrative, for space in a conversation. It changes the cadence of speech itself. In Khufiya, when KM (Tabu) and Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi) are talking on the phone, and she asks about her marriage, her past, KM lights a cigarette and smokes it — “smokes it” is putting it lightly, she sucks on it, hollowing her cheeks, giving all the psychoanalysts who have written about the cigarette as a phallic symbol a run for their money; she’s a lesbian. It allows for the pauses to feel less heavy, and for thought to take more time to become words.