Nepal, July 5 -- Excerpted from 'OTP Please!: Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia' by Vandana Vasudevan.

Growing up in Mussoorie, smoking was an occasional, furtive indulgence for Aarav Tiwari, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer in the Supreme Court. He would join his friends at a local paan shop and puff away, secure in the knowledge that their parents had no idea about their antics. Even in law school, about five or six years ago, he would only light up by walking to the corner shop and getting a smoke.

When he is at the court, he doesn't carry a packet. He has a deal with the paan shop around the corner, where he has paid the panwallah for twenty cigarettes in advance. Every time he goes and smokes one or two, the pan wallah se...