- Smoke

Mahmood forgot to bring the cigarette box to the funeral of his wife. He strolled on the national highway looking for a tobacco vendor but the road was deserted. An old man passed on a bicycle smoking a beedi. The air smelled of burnt mollasse for country sugar production. He saw a villager smoking beedi so approaches and requests him for one. The villager offers a beedi but refuses the reward.

A cyclist fell off the road by heat-stroke near to where the two people were smoking tobacco. The villager walked over to the man and dragged him to the edge of the road as Mahmood looked on. The man had lost conciousness. On the upper pocket of the unconscious person was a pack full of cigarettes. Mahmood looked at his watch and then at those cigarettes. He hideously grabbed the packet and hushed it hastingly in his upper pocket which was not there. Then he slid it inside his shirt and it dropped from below. Finally he manages to deposit the box inside his socks.

For some time he pretends to be of help but looses patience and makes way back home. The villager shadows behind him.

Mahmood, back home from the funeral and discarding the sullen look for ones who came to pay condolence- cooked himself a meal and smoked a cigarette. There he thought how easy would it now be to bring a girl-friend home. Later, he switched off the TV and came to the open terrace to drink liquer and watch the moon. The villager is lurching from in shadows.

Mehmud got asleep in the cool breeze and the open terrace but often disturbed by mosquitoes. The villager appeared from shadows and came near the sleeping Mahmood. He sniffed for tobacco under Mahmud's cot, nearMahmuds pockets and his ears. Mahmud hears the sounds of sniffing a woman in his dream. The villager used this trance by asking him to throw over the packet of cigarettes over his head. Mehmud in the urgency to please his lady love in dream threw the packet and the villager leapt to catch it out of the three story terrace to fell down and die.

In the morning, Mehmud was waken by the police and the man whose cigarette packet Mehmud stole. The police charged him of murder of the Villager.

So, Don't Smoke.