Smoking, or the desire to smoke, is a motif that punctuates Nikki’s life and moods, emerging especially when she is stressed. Nikki has a cigarette before boarding the train to Southall and “itches” for one when the temple comes into sight from the bus. While struggling to decide where to place her sister’s matrimonial ad, she longs for a cigarette, opting to chew on her thumbnail instead. Dinner with her family prompts her to slip “into the back garden to sneak an after-dinner cigarette” (43). Before every class at the temple, she either does or desires to smoke, “having discovered a spot where she could hide and have a cigarette” (79). She also used smoking to soothe herself after being insulted by the American tourist who remarks that Nikki’s ethnicity makes her a “foreigner.”

Smoking represents in part Nikki’s struggle with her hybrid identity. It suggests how, even in adulthood, she is hiding or burying some part of herself. Nikki has smoked in secret since she was a teenager, first taping and later using Velcro adhesive tape to hide her contraband from her parents under her bed (347). She even had a “quick odour-neutralizing routine she had practised to perfection as a teenager” (88) that involved pulling back her hair and taking off her jacket before smoking and using strong mint perfume after smoking.