Women’s Day Roast: Same Cigarette | Call Me Unfiltered

Gary Lawyer’s voice came through the television like it owned the building.
Rich. Dark. Unhurried.
The kind of baritone that has never once been interrupted in a meeting,
never will be,
and honestly doesn’t need to be
because when that voice speaks,
the room just — stops.
With a cigarette in my hand, I felt like a man.
The man on screen moved through dark, stylish shots like he’d wandered into a music video and decided to stay.

Jaw. Collar. Wind doing exactly what it was told, like it was on payroll.
Cigarette between two fingers like it had always lived there.
Like it was born there.
Like the cigarette itself exhaled in relief at finally finding the right hand.
Now here’s the thing.
This was an anti-smoking ad.
A public service announcement.
A warning.
The whole song flips —
With a cigarette in my hand, I was a dead man.
That was the message.
That was what a health campaign spent actual money to tell
the children of 1990s India.
What the children of 1990s India heard was the first verse.
Memorised it.
Hummed it on the way to school.
Felt something shift in their chest that rhymes with aspiration.
Gary Lawyer, you absolute menace.
You dressed a warning in a tuxedo,
gave it a jingle and cheekbones,
and an entire generation RSVP’d yes
before the chorus even landed.
I didn’t want the man.
I wanted what the man had.
The posture. The cool. The magnificent audacity
of existing without explaining himself to a single soul.
Reader, it inspired me to smoke.

Same cigarette.
Years later.
My hand.
The world didn’t combust.
It just — recalibrated.
That half-second.
Before the face remembers to behave itself.
The slow scan, top to bottom,
like they’re looking for a receipt,
like they need to verify the purchase,
like the cigarette came with terms and conditions
that apparently only applied to one gender
and I skipped that page entirely.
Because cool has always had a dress code.
And the fine print?
Never shown to us.
Not once.
Not in the ad, not in the jingle,
not in the voice that sounded like freedom
and turned out to be a members-only club.

Let’s talk about the POSH committee.
Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace.
Passed in 2013.
Mandatory in every organisation with ten or more employees.

A whole committee, framework.
A whole policy document sitting in a shared drive titled something like HR_Policies_Final_v3_UPDATED_USE THIS ONE
that has not been opened since the day it was uploaded
by someone who has since left the company.
Women know this.
Because women are the ones who find out —
quietly, carefully, at personal cost —
that the POSH committee functions the way respect functions on March 8th.
Once a year.
Nicely formatted.
Cake in the pantry.
Filed and forgotten by 3pm.
The man it’s supposed to address?
Still in the next cabin.
Still cc’d on every email like a structural feature of the building.
Still invited to the team lunch
because it’s complicated
and we don’t want to make things awkward.
She moved desks.
She is described as sensitive.
He is described as going through a difficult time.
The difficult time, apparently, is consequence.
Which arrived fourteen months late,
stayed for a Tuesday,
and left before anyone had to be uncomfortable at the annual offsite.

Then there are the others.
The ones nobody lowers their voice for loudly enough.
The uncle at the family gathering who was just friendly.
The teacher everyone knew about and nobody stopped
because stopping him would have required
a conversation nobody wanted to have
at a dinner table where the fish curry was very good and why ruin it.
The man in a position of trust
who understood, early,
that trust in this country
has very few receipts
and even fewer consequences.
And the girl.
She learned to make herself smaller.
Learned which staircases.
Which hours.
Which silences.

She did all of this before she was ten.
She did not get a committee.
She got told not to make a scene.
This part isn’t funny.
It was never going to be funny.
Moving on.

The woman leader.
She out-performed, out-prepared, out-stayed
every person in that room
until they ran out of reasons
and ran out of road
and had to give her the title
with the energy of people
doing her a significant personal favour.
Then came the audits.
Not of her work.
Of her tone.
Her approach.
Whether she was a lot.
Whether the team found her difficult to warm to— which is corporate for she stopped performing gratitude for her own position
and we’re not sure how to handle it.
The man before her — who, I cannot stress this enough, genuinely could not find the mop —
was described as strong. decisive. clear.
She uses the same words in the same meeting
and receives a 360 feedback form
with the phrase needs to work on her communication style
from three people who have never once communicated anything
that wasn’t a passive-aggressive reply-all.
Same room, table, words. 
Entirely different verdict.
She smiles through it —
not because she has to,
but because she’s been doing it since she was eight
and by now the muscle memory is frankly immaculate.

The neighbour next door.
Woman. Alone. Dog.
Large dog.
Extremely large dog
who has never harmed anyone
but takes up the full width of the corridor
and makes eye contact like she’s read your file.

No man visible on the premises.
No ring.
No male voice answering the door.
Just her, her life, her impeccably maintained flat,
and a dog who considers himself both security and HR.
The building has thoughts.
The aunty on the second floor has concerns she hasn’t been asked for.
The society WhatsApp group — fourteen members, twelve opinions, one person typing “Can we discuss?” at 11pm — has held an informal referendum on whether a single woman with a large dog is appropriate for a family building.
A family building.
She is a family.
She and the dog are a family.
The dog would like the building to know this personally
and at close range
if anyone would like to raise the issue again.
Meanwhile, the man on the third floor
who parks across two spaces
and once flooded the flat below him
through sheer innovative negligence
has never been the subject of a WhatsApp poll.
Not once.
Not even a “Can we discuss?”
Different verdict.
Always.

And then the one nobody has a panel for.
The house of siblings.
No mother to back you up.
Not a tragedy with a lesson stitched in at the end.
Just the specific, daily texture of being a woman
in a house full of people who love you
and also cannot quite stand that you are doing fine.
The insecurities don’t arrive with a label.
They arrive dressed as concern.
Are you sure about that?
Don’t you think you should—
Mummy would have wanted—
Mummy.
Who is not here.
Who cannot be cited.
Who cannot be called in as backup
for a version of events
that rewrites itself
every time you gain ground.
The woman without her mother
navigates the world
without the one person
who believed her unconditionally —
without evidence,
without the full story,
without needing to form her own opinion first.
Everyone else needs evidence.
Everyone else loves you and also keeps score.
Mummy didn’t keep score.
And that absence —
weight-bearing, furniture-shaped, daily —
is the thing no cupcake addresses.
No forward touches.
No panel has a slide for.
She carries it like she carries everything else.
Without being asked.
Without being thanked.
Without a jingle.

So.
When they hand you the pink cupcake today
and ask you to smile for the group photo
between 2 and 3pm
before the meeting room gets booked again —
know that somewhere,
a woman is sitting in a POSH hearing
that will resolve itself into a desk move and a vague email.
Somewhere, a woman leader is reading feedback
about her communication style
from a man who hasn’t communicated in three years
and still has the mop situation outstanding.
Somewhere, a woman is in her flat,
dog at her feet like a small loyal country,
building having its opinions,
completely unbothered
and also completely exhausted
at having to be unbothered
every single day
without a break,
without a stand-in,
without anyone noticing that unbothered
is not a personality.
It’s a survival strategy with good posture.

With a cigarette in my hand, I felt like a man.
She lit her own, Gary.
Always did.
No jingle.
No tuxedo warning.
No baritone giving her permission.
Just her hand.
Her lighter.
Her life,
conducted entirely on her own terms
in a world that has spent considerable energy
suggesting she pick different terms.
The wind cooperated anyway.
It always does,
for the ones who stop waiting to be told it’s their turn.

The truth doesn’t wait for March 9th.

P.S. Also — women. Let’s not pretend. The sibling with the sideways comment. The female boss who got there first and pulled the ladder up behind her because your existence reminds her of what she had to swallow to get there. The friend who called her quiet sabotage concern. Who was threatened by you in a room that had enough space for both of you and decided it didn’t.
Hurt people don’t check their gender before they pass it on.

P.S. My former employer never filed a POSH committee. Not misplaced. Not forgotten. Never filed. Happy Women’s Day to them specifically.