It is not a pleasant experience to have a chain-smoker as your room-mate when you are still in the 10th grade. Not only does the passive smoking affect you physically, the thought that one of your friends is ruining his life tends to stay on your mind for a longer period than trivial matters such as final exams. I always thought that the most dangerous things that could happen in my room would be a fiercely contested inter-room football game or a slightly over-the-top head banging session. Unfortunately all my idyllic misconceptions of life in the 10th grade were overturned when I realized how easy it was for a student in India to purchase and consume contraband without getting caught. Rahul has always been a good friend of mine. He was a little ‘different’ as a kid (he spent hours working on imaginary science experiments and Imagined that he was Spiderman) but everyone always got along with him. I became really close to him by the 9th grade and we began spending a lot of time together, both in school and during the vacations. It was during one such meeting in the10th grade that I noticed a lighter in his pocket. Now when your 15 years old many of the people around you tend to ‘experiment’ with cigarettes, so I was not overly worried about the lighter. Yet I did not want Rahul to do anything stupid, so I asked him how long he had been smoking for. He told me that he rarely smoked and just tried it once for the ‘experience’, so I dropped the issue.
But 2 months later things took a turn for the worse. One lazy Sunday
afternoon at school (we studied in a boarding school), Rahul casually asked me whether I wanted to accompany him for a ‘smoke’. At first I thought he was joking, but when he showed me the Marlboro packet I realized that Rahul had joined a long list of students who smuggled contraband into boarding school (Dead Poets Society illustrates this clearly). I politely declined and also shouted at him angrily for 5 minutes (for added effect). He said that it was nothing serious and tried to convince me that it was a ‘one-off’ thing. But I was didn’t believe him and shared my worry with two other close friends. Nothing happened for another week but one night I woke up to find Rahul missing. I was immediately suspicious, I searched around but he was nowhere in the hostel. I stayed up expecting him to appear from somewhere and sure enough 15 minutes later he climbed in through the window that now curiously had a few missing rods.. He smelled like a chimney and I realized that the Marlboro was certainly not a ‘one-off’ thing...
Rahul was quite shocked to see me but to my surprise he didn’t even bother to explain himself. He told me that smoking cigarettes weren’t as bad as I thought and told me to stop worrying. And so things continued. Soon I began to find empty cigarette packets in old suitcases, in dustbins and once even near my bed. Things were slowly getting out of control. It was soon common knowledge at the hostel that Rahul was smoking and in a short period of time his physical status had changed from ‘experimenting’ to ‘chain smoker’. What worried me further was the fact that he was getting a regular supply of cigarettes, something a little shocking since our boarding school was located on a remote hill in rural Maharashtra. I often tried confronting Rahul and getting him to stop, but he just wouldn’t listen. His smoking seemed to isolate him from the rest of us; by the time our study holidays arrived he was almost always alone in some remote part of our campus. During the vacations things only got worse.
I realized that I needed to take action. I first thought of complaining to a teacher. But that is where my real ethical dilemma kicked in. The school had strict laws against smoking. If I reported Rahul’s actions to the teachers he would probably be thrown out of school. Rahul was going through a rough patch in life, his parents had divorced 2 years ago and he was settling into his new life. In addition, he was hardly a bad person and he always did his best to not promote smoking amongst the other school children. I really didn’t believe that he deserved to be rusticated. Yet on one hand the only way I could stop him from destroying his life was by reporting him to teachers, but by reporting him to teachers I ...would only be hastening up the destruction process. I did not want to break Rahul’s trust; I did not want to hide the truth from my teachers, but most of all I did not want to spoil Rahul’s life.
So I had to find another solution. I decided to take matters into my own
hands. I thought I would try and stop his supply. But try as I might I could not figure out where he got his cigarettes from. I decided to do the next best thing, take his cigarettes away from him. Now the very thought of stealing completely disgusts me. In addition, I would be stealing from a friend and a confidant, a double breach of trust. I was torn apart and began spending a lot of time thinking over the matter. Should I break my moral values for a higher cause? Also, if Rahul realized that I was stealing his cigarettes he would be upset. I was one of the few people he confided in and it would be horrible for me to break his trust. Rahul was going through a lot of troubles, in his family life, in his love-life and from an academic perspective. He thought that smoking helped calm him and try as I might I couldn’t convince show him that smoking only worsened things. I feared that by preventing from smoking I would create an emotional backlash, the last thing he needed with his final exams mere months away. But try as I might I could not see any other problem to the solution. So another friend and I started to steal Rahul’s cigarettes. It is a horrible experience rummaging through a friends locker while he was not around, but I knew what I had to do. We decided to leave him a few ‘smokes’ so that he could ‘calm his nerves’, but made sure that we ‘confiscated’ a large majority of the cigarettes. When Rahul realized that his cigarettes were missing he started to worry a lot, he thought that junior students were taking them to smoke, he began to worry that teachers had come to know what he was doing. But not for a moment did he suspect me, and for some reason this made me feel even more guilty.
But things got worse. I too was having a fair share of my own problems, and the increasing amounts of cigarettes in my locker, really dark thoughts started forming in my head. “One cigarette can’t do any harm…”, “Maybe I can concentrate better…”But before I could do anything stupid I made sure that my fiend disposed off all the contraband. Meanwhile Rahul was beginning to get really flustered about his disappearing stash. This really worried us; we began to feel guilty about his problems. But before we got any second thoughts, something happened which changed the whole scenario.
It is not a smart idea to smoke in your own room, especially when your ‘house-parent’ is in the hostel. Unfortunately Rahul learned this simple lesson the hard way. He was caught smoking by a teacher. Things happened very fast and the fear of a friend’s rustication really hit us hard. But that is when the school did something strange. They did not expel Rahul. In fact they did not take any strict action. All they did was suspend him from the hostel. He spent the last 2 months of school with his grandmother. This effectively stopped all his illegal activities for a while and in hindsight the school really saved Rahul. If they had expelled him he would have probably returned to his broken city life devoid of any hope or ambition. It scares me to think what he would have become. But those two months with his grandmother, brought him back from the edge.
Rahul eventually did well in his exams and studies in a good college and
lives with his father. This is not a happy ending though. Unfortunately
Rahul has returned to smoking, but he has developed self-control.
We are very good friends, and I recently told him about the fact that I stole from him. After a brief minute of abuse he forgave and even thanked me for my actions. I never expected to face such a tough ethical dilemma at such a young age, but that experience has really taught me a lot about life.
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