How I got hooked on hookah, shisha and the lot...
Every year my wife stops smoking, and she's become quite good at it (wide grin)! Partly, that's because I help her. Although I don't want to give up smoking myself, on January the first of every year I put my cigars away and say to her: "As long as you don't smoke your cigarettes, I will not smoke my cigars". Never was there any need to keep the faithful cheroots locked up for long: the "Light of my Life and Reason for my Existence" usually sticks less than two months to her determination, so by early March she and I are puffing away happily again.
That's been going on since we met in 1981, and only two years ago, in the spring of 2006, the whole scheme fell apart. We were visiting a relative in Kuwait who, together with her Saudi-Arabian boyfriend, took us out for dinner and afterwards said: "Let's all have a waterpipe now: a shisha". That particular year my wifes determinations lasted unusually long: that fateful day on the shores of the Persian Gulf was already the second of April, and neither she nor myself had smoked! This did not keep us from granting ourselves dispensation, to the profound satisfaction of the head basha in the shisha garden who quickly produced a couple of waterpipes or shishas, to be shared between the four of us. Basha lighted the contraptions, and taking turns on both pipes we puffed away with great and varied satisfaction - one shisha was filled with apple flavored tobacco, the other with cherry taste.
This, I am sad to say, proved to be our downfall. The next afternoon, after having flown to Cairo, my wife and I sat down near the pool of the Mena House Hotel in Gizah, where a basha approached us, inquiring whether we wanted to drink something, and possibly smoke a shisha too... We fell, "She Who Must Be Obeyed" and myself. We ordered soft drinks and an apple-filled waterpipe. The next day we did the same, and the next... until our vacation reached the end of its natural life and we flew back to EHAM, The Netherlands.The next morning we looked at each other. "We will miss our shisha this afternoon", my wife mused. "Possibly, but not necessarily", I replied cleverly. "You mean...?" she probed. "Yes!" I said. That did it. Marching to the beat of a distant Kuwaiti or Egyptian drummer we approached our car, got in, and drove to the nearest store that sold shishas. We bought one, with all bells and whistles, including tobacco. And that evening, in my very own den, the "Lady of the House" and myself shared a fine shisha.
Yes, that's two years ago now. Presently we're the proud owners of four shisha or hooka pipes, a great variety of tobaccos, and an impressive cough. But really: my wife never touched her cigarettes again, nor I my cigars...
By Jaap Verduijn, first published on Qassia.
