SMOKING HAUTE

The growing legion of women cigar smokers are storming the male order of the fragrant leaf for one upmann-ship

- SHANKER GANGADHAR

Marriage was no match for a good cigar that Rudyard Kipling had ever lit. "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke," was the tobacco trope that defined him as a white male of Britain's imperial age where woman, if included "was merely as an ornamental appendage and in an inferior role similar to that of the trusted native,"-as feminist author Julia Bush put it. Kipling, Britain's first Nobel Laureate in Literature, would have been as flummoxed as a Cuban in a 'No Smoking' lounge to learn that George Sand was no ornamental Belle Epoque maiden, but a celebrated French author who discovered that smoking a cigar can "fill the solitary hours with a million gracious images."