Mumbai: Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has “almost” given a clean chit to actors Deepika Padukone, Sara Ali Khan and Shraddha Kapoor, and Padukone’s manager Karishma Prakash, said officials on Tuesday.

Padukone and Prakash on Saturday reportedly told NCB officials that in 2017 WhatsApp chats, they had used the words maal, weed, hash and doob as code names for various kinds of cigarettes “for fun”. The two said they referred to low quality cigarettes as maal, slim and better quality ones as hash and weed, and thick ones as doob.

NCB officials asked Padukone and Prakash the same set of questions in separate rooms. “We were satisfied as both corroborated the codes,” said an official. NCB was questioning the duo over their 2017 WhatsApp chats where they had discussed certain code words and it was assumed they were discussing drugs.

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Mumbai: At a time when eavesdropping on people’s phone conversations could lead you to words like ‘dope’ (which isn’t drug but millennial lingo for ‘cool’) or ‘slay’ (that doesn’t mean killing someone but excelling at something), the Hindi word ‘maal’ is curiously at risk after it drew the attention of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and a lot of fire on social media.

To place the term in its current context, actor Deepika Padukone was interrogated by NCB for six hours on Saturday over a 2017 WhatsApp chat where she had asked her manager for ‘maal’ interpreted by the agency as ‘contraband’.

While the NCB on Tuesday said that they found truth in Padukone’s statement that ‘maal’ was a code word the actor had come up with to describe low quality cigarettes, the internet is an obsessive place that has brought this politically incorrect word of yore back into vogue.

A word that started life as a common noun meaning ‘goods’ or ‘commodity’ became a jargon that travelled widely over generations and became an expression often shoved out of polite conversation—it’s meaning ranging from a slang for money or wealth, a code for alcohol, cigarettes or contraband, and even a derogatory reference to a woman.

“Maal was coined at least 40 years ago as tapori talk favoured by dons. Today, it has multiple uses and connotations. The amazing thing about slang is that popular words are open to several interpretations, depending on the context,” says author Shobhaa De, while trying to explain how Indian lingo can take on a life of its own to capture what the dictionary cannot.

This rambling free-for-all word has been notoriously shaped and reshaped by Bollywood too—be it the 1994 film Andaz where Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla jived to the naughty lyrics ‘Main maal gaadi tu dhakka laga/ Garam ho engine mera dhakka deta jaa’ or the dialogue ‘Kya maal hai yaar’ often mouthed by eve-teasers and romantic heroes to address a good-looking woman. Its sizeable interpretations that could have drawn the attention of CBFC or got into trouble with the National Commission for Women got its separate fanbase and a meme instead.

The “brouhaha” over the political correctness of a word that no more means what it used to in its original form baffles food historian Kurush Dalal. “In government parlance, a person in charge of the kitchen is called ‘Maalwala’ in Hindi or Marathi. Because ‘maal’ means items and the ‘maalwala’ is the one with the keys who supervises and rolls out the ‘maal’ or ‘saman’. Of course, the word has gone places as street slang to mean many other things, including intoxicating substances or a good-looking woman but that’s the thing about language. It’s about communication.”