Just some snuff

Muttashan used to snuff, or do snuff or whatever is the expression for sniffing powdered tobacco into your nostrils, waiting for it and then legendarily sneezing multiple times, loud enough to scare the crows off the coconut tree tops.

Muttashan is what I refer to my grandfather as. As a child, I would see among his closest possessions, a sharp pen knife, a long chequered kerchief (one corner of which he would tuck into the front of his mundu, leaving the rest to hang listlessly, also probably weighed down by all the mucus in it!) and two tiny plastic bottles – one with a red cap, the other with a green one. I remember that he used to sneeze many times during the day but never made the mental connection between those bottles and the incessant sneezing.

I asked my mom because moms were Google.com before Google.com came into being. By the power vested in them to become your mother, they know everything. She said it is ‘mooki podi’, or literally ‘nose powder’.

I wasn’t much of a fussy or the tantrum-throwing kind but I was denied a trial of this exciting ‘nose powder’ when I asked for it once, albeit meekly.

Now, years later, I got a cousin to buy me some snuff, just to know what it feels like. My mother, still Google, strictly forbade it. My cousin still managed to get me a packet (I thought was small but which is going to last me an eternity) of snuff.

 

Muttashan would carefully tap some powder onto his palm, close the bottle, then pinch some powder between his index finger and his thumb, hold it inside his nostrils one by one and sniff.

I emulated him from memory. I took a pinch from the packet, held it to my nostrils and snorted. The thing went straight to the back of my nose, met the back of my tongue and somehow said hullo to my throat. The insides of my nasal tract burned like it does when you step into an unwashed-for-days public urinal. Now this is definitely what a bad habit feels like.

Some online forum tells me that I probably did it wrong. Snuff is closer to sniff than it is to snort.

I tried the sniff.

I hated it. I have no idea why Muttashan subjected his respiratory system to this for decades. The last time I met him, he said he stopped doing it two years ago. Good for him.

I am also a little dejected. I had resented to find online, a snuff bullet – a carry capsule for the powder that lets you inhale controlled amounts of snuff at the tweak of a tiny knob. I had planned to show it off and snuff away while the rest tarred off their lungs with smoke. 

The fancy-ass snuff bullets I wanted to buy online.

So anyway, no more powdered tobacco for my nose. However, I have discovered that I like sneezing. It clears my head and propels unwanted stuff out of the system.

To induce this sneezing, I find myself hooked to this product called ‘Chhikni’. It is powdered eucalyptus or Nilgiri leaves, or so they say.

It’s yummy!

The bottle of Chhikni with the name scraped off inadvertently. Most of us have this habit of disrobing bottles of their labels.