She Sells Sheesha

I bought a hookah for my daughter's birthday present. (Don't worry; she never reads my blog.) I bought it because she's about to return to the States from Egypt, where "smoking shisha" is a community ritual, one even a middle aged mom is finally induced to try during a recent visit to Cairo.

"Smokin' sheesha/shisha," for the unindoctrinated, is smoking a hookah. You know, water pipe. You know, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. What Lord Byron talks about in Verse XIX of Canto II of The Island. It is not, fyi, getting high, although in some cases, including my own, it comes close to it; I definitely felt altered after a few hits and not altogether for the better. In many countries, such as Egypt, smokin' shisha is as uncontroversial and easy as smoking cigarettes used to be everywhere. In tea houses, in the back rooms of tourist shops and highway rest stops, there's a hookah ready to be lit, shisha in many aromas and flavors waiting to be sampled. Leisure. That's what shisha represents. Relaxing with friends.

Which is why, I guess, I just bought this darned hookah for my daughter. I want to help keep a little bit of Egypt alive in her soul, I guess, an ember that glows for many years to come, giving her perspective on the time she's spent living there, so far from what she's known in the USA. Once she returns here, she'll be driven to follow her skills, her intelligence, her extraordinary individual composite of personality and interest and ability. In the first year of a five-year PhD program, there's not a lot of time allocated for sitting around teahouses smoking apple-flavored shisha.

If you glance at his picture of me taken when I finally agreed to try smoking, you'll probably have no doubt that I wasn't a natural at it nor even a slightly promising recruit. My daughter burst out in extended bent-over laughter as she watched me try to appear like I knew what I was doing. After just a few hits, I'd had enough; I could feel a deadly pallor creeping over my face and a queasiness growing in my stomach. But it tasted good, to my surprise, much sweeter and softer than the taste of cigarettes I remember from years ago before we learned it was bad for us.

Turns out smoking shisha is probably just as bad as smoking cigarettes. Here's what the Mayo Clinic has to say about its health risks, in case you're an advocate, addict or idly attentive: Mayo Shisha? The American Cancer Society votes a big thumbs down, as well. And it's not just crusading Westerners who realize smoking shisha is unhealthy; Muslim groups have begun working to persuade the young in shisha-rich countries, those who have returned the practice to popularity, to abstain. So why the heck am I giving a hookah to my daughter?

Well, they're beautiful. The low point of my recent travels in Egypt was when a paid driver of mine left me alone in a remote and squalid building with a few old Muslims watching a spooling recitation of the Quran on a wall-mounted television, and the only object I felt comfortable looking at was an assortment of hookahs on a repair table, pictured here. And the idea of sitting around an open air cafe with a small group of good friends on a fresh summer evening, sipping hibiscus tea and apple shisha is lovely, too. But maybe she'll figure out a way to use it that doesn't hurt her. Like blowing bubbles.

Or maybe it would be okay to sit with someone you love and slowly share a pipe now and then. It makes me think of the word languorous, and wouldn't that be nice once in a while.