Loco Foco

word dropping10

I did not the credentials of Prem ji until that day. Prem ji sells cigarettes in a university and keeps reading Hindi thriller novels of the Atank Hi Atank types at the same time. That is his eyes do not waver from his book while he is giving you the fare. I walked up to his shop with a friend who was slightly delirious because he’d been awake a couple of days writing his M Phil thesis. So the friend says to Prem ji, “Monsieur, for the sake of the equipoise of my bleary eyes and weary life, can you please give me some fine blended tobacco rolled in fine paper, and backed with a filter that can reduce its carcinogenic effect?”
Prem ji put a pan inside his mouth and for the first time I heard him speak English, “Well, the cancer stick will remain a cancer stick. And will stick to you, you see. After all the word cancer itself comes from ‘crab’.” Saying this, he handed over the lightest cigarette available, to my friend.
Friend was flummoxed. He said to Prem ji, “Oh you can pun too.”
And pat came the reply, “And I can have fun too. Because I do not smoke like you. I just have paan. So I was telling you that cancer is related to crabs. You must be knowing, you guys read all that fluff – Linda Goodman’s Sunsigns and all.”
“How do you know?” Friend said.
“I know who reads what,” said the vendor, and continued, “Greek physician Galen noted the similarity in some tumours with swollen veins and the crabs. And so he named the disease after the Greek word karinos, which now means a crab, a tumour and a sunsign. I tell you English is such a funny language.”
It was quite windy and my frind wasn’t able to light his cigarette. So Prem ji took it, put it in his mouth lifted his head and lit the match against the wind, which blew the fame towards the cigarette and lit it. Style.
“A fortune is to be made against the wind,” he said after lighting and handing over the stick to friend. Friend stared and Prem ji said, “Rhett Butler’s dialogue from Gone in the Wind. That’s how I learnt how to light a cigarette when it’s windy. But you are weak hearted. You need a loco foco.”
“Now what’s that?” I asked.
“Well it’s a self-lighting cigarette. Foco is from Spanish fuego for fire. And loco they didn’t know stood for place and not for ‘self’. In a New York assembly the lights went out, and they used such matches. It was 1837.”
“Prem ji how do you know so much,” I was incredulous.
“Well I was also a PhD student here,” he said, “And I realised I want to stay here and just read books all my life. But my choices have changed as you can see.”