Once a year, around the time Hindus celebrate Krishna’s birthday, the parcel arrives. It is gaudily decorated and bears neither the senders’ name nor their (precise) address. The ink smudged postage stamps suggest that it has been dispatched somewhere from Mumbai. The city’s officials having reverted back to using its former but not older name: Bombay, which it had when Calculus first stayed there in the 1960’s, smoking silver hookahs, dabbling in Eastern philosophies and developing a serious beedi habit.
To: Calculus
Château Sauvette
Mount Wilders
South State Europa
Contents (for customs):
500 x बीडी सिगरेट् इत्यस्य सर्वोत्तमम्
Calculus can not think for the life of him who can be sending the parcels or what he might have done to deserve them. Says i am to solve this mystery or come up at least with a plausible explanation. Equally mysterious is why i have been assigned this job.
The resumption of heavy duty smoking has caused Calculus a supplementary worry: a rapidly depleting Great Beedi Parcel. He is down to his very last smokes. Puff puff. Will power in free-fall. Puff puff.
Calculus likes to smoke while thinking. Those poor lungs of his have over the years burned up quite prodigious quantities of tobacco. He only cut down his consumption when Europa’s plantations suffered three consecutive summers of drought. Robot run they may be, but a poor harvest is a poor harvest, which no amount of technical tinkering can fix. Prices thus went through the roof.
Calculus was making one of his precious packets of beedis last him a whole day until he got wind of Josef A’s e-balloon project for Mount Wilders. Spooked by the news, his baccy intake shot up to record levels. He is now quite literally chain smoking, getting either me or a Kommune musicians to help knot together the ends of beedis. Extricating these twiglet smokes from their packet is a fiddly business; a task that has lately fallen to Manu whose chubby (ringed) fingers belie an exceptional dexterity – in keeping with their owner’s exceptional musicality.
At night Calculus smokes, sleeping little. Pass by his yurt, you’ll likely see the nocturnal glow of a lit beedi. An old man’s rasping breath re-igniting the tendu leaf rolled tobacco. Escaping from his yurt, little puffs of smoke, detached from their maker yet seeming to possess some of his anarchic spirit.