CHENNAI: It was the perfect excuse for every non-smoker to experience what thousands of cigarette smokers experienced during every coffee break, albeit at a substantially higher price and without the tag of being a ‘smoker’.When hookah was first served in a plush, arabesque Chennai coffee lounge on the Khader Nawaz Khan Road in 2006, it was the new ‘in thing’. Everyone who was anyone, would ask before relapsing into pleasantries, “Have you tried hookah yet?” invariably followed by an ecstatic facial expression.“The first time I tried smoking hookah was on my 16th birthday,” recalls Ankita, an automobile engineer. “It felt very adult-like to be served the steaming pipe and not feel like we were breaking the law,” she adds.Though for a brief period that mansion-like coffee lounge monopolised hookah service - essentially only for those with fat pockets, the smoke gates were thrown open when one of the country’s largest coffee shop chains began serving the flavoured smoke.Arjun Raman, who now runs a freight firm, says, “Instead of paying `300 upwards, we were able to try out basic hookah flavours for as low as `100. So if five of us shared a pipe for an hour, it worked out to be pretty economical.”By mid-2007, hookah was a big draw at all the cafés in the chain, and then just as suddenly the honeymoon period ended. “We had a police inspection at an outlet on Landons Road, after which we were allowed to have hookahs but with restrictions,” reveals Satish, a former employee. Thereafter, large display boards were put up warning under-18s to stay away. “We had to check IDs and that was when business began receding,” he shrugs.That’s when other popular hangouts picked up from where the café chain left off. From sports bars, coffee shops and gaming parlours, more expensive pipes were then served in private lounges in luxury hotels.Rajesh Modi, a part-time model, reveals how a lot of the camera-shy crowd, who could afford it, preferred private hookah parties. “Only last year, two pubs in the city introduced hookah lounges so that we could enjoy a puff and a drink,” he says. However, while it was almost close to impossible to find an empty pipe at any of the city’s 20-odd hookah spots on a weekend, the demographic of the crowd had changed significantly.“You’d almost never see a college student smoking hookah at a coffee shop. If you do, it’s probably because they’re bunking class and have nowhere else to go to kill time,” explains Ankita. “Mostly, it’s school kids on their weekly outing who end up clogging hookah bars in Nungambakkam and Adyar.”Hookah usage among young adults reached saturation point after an exclusive lounge opened up in Gandhi Nagar. “There were always a few regulars who kept an unofficial tab for the shisha (flavoured powder) they smoked, but otherwise it was the kids who were attracted by the crazy flavours there,” says Arjun.Five years on, with the shift in the tag of owning a hookah from ‘exclusivity’ to ‘mandatory’, the fate of the lounges now hangs in the balance after the Chennai Corporation’s recent crackdown. “This is the fourth time we have had our shisha bar disturbed by the officials,” reveals the manager of another swanky continental eatery on the KNK Road that served pipes on its terrace. Just after turning away a group of four girls seeking a hookah fix, he says with a touch of irritation, “We have had to turn away over 80 people every evening. At this rate, we are planning to close it and try to procure a bar licence,” he says. That would, in fact, be less troublesome, he feels.While it is very difficult to dissuade regulars from adding a little tobacco into the mix, it’s almost close to impossible to discern when they are adding marijuana or other banned substances, says Satish. “When we served hookah, sometimes we would smell something different, but we could never confront regulars because that would have cost us our jobs, if we had been wrong,” he adds.With the pipes lying idle for a few weeks, managers and owners of hookah lounges have their fingers crossed.
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