Safiq Shaikh was 13 when he began chewing a blend of tobacco and spices that jolted him awake whenever his job at a textile loom got too dreary. Five years later, doctors in Mumbai lopped off his tongue to halt the cancer spreading through his mouth. Shaikh believed the fragrant, granular mixture he chewed, known in India as gutka, was harmless, so at first he ignored the milky lump growing inside his mouth. Now he is one of about 200,000 Indians diagnosed with a tobacco-related malignancy this year, says his surgeon, Dr. Pankaj Chaturvedi, who works at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai.
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