Brendan Bencharit , one of the partners behind Nile Lounge, argues that hookah smokers indulge far less frequently than cigarette smokers, and therefore are exposed to fewer chemicals. Until recently, when he began working long hours to ready Nile Lounge for its opening, Bencharit, 24, smoked a hookah every three or four days.
"It is tobacco. It does have inherent dangers," he said. "But the hookah's something that you do with a group of people. The risks aren't as great as smoking cigarettes."
Bencharit and his business partner, both recent Johns Hopkins University graduates, are hoping to draw crowds of college students and young adults. They decided to open Nile Lounge in Boston after learning, to their surprise, that there were few places here to smoke hookah.
The Nile will serve food, but it was licensed as a smoking bar, not a restaurant, which allows it to skirt the indoor smoking ban.
"We're just really big fans of the hookah," Bencharit said. "We've been using it for a while. We understand and we appreciate the hookah. We know exactly what we're smoking."
Until their recent resurgence, the pipes were perhaps most famously depicted in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ," in which Lewis Carroll wrote about a hookah-smoking caterpillar, perched atop a toadstool, peering down at Alice.
Hookahs, water pipes that originated in ancient Persia and India, were probably first used for smoking opium or hashish. But once tobacco arrived in the Middle East and Asia, people also began smoking tobacco leaves sweetened with honey, molasses or dried fruit in hookahs.
In Charlestown, Tangierino , a Moroccan restaurant, has an attached hookah bar called the Casbah Lounge . But some of the few other places that offer hookah are seasonal, open only when the weather is warm (and dry) enough to sit on outdoor patios. Like Kashmir, the Tantric Bar & Grill , on Stuart Street, offers hookahs when the weather turns warm.
Mantra, an Indian restaurant in the Ladder District off the Common , offered hookah until the city's ban on indoor smoking in public places took effect three years ago. It does not have a patio.
Kashmir, which belongs to the same restaurant group as Mantra, began offering hookah on its outdoor patio. Business has increased in each of three years since Kashmir brought hookahs outside, said Surinder Singh , the restaurant's manager.
On some nights, he said, there's a wait for one of the restaurant's 10 hookahs. The flavored tobacco is heated with burning charcoal in the head of the pipe.
At Northeastern University , students say the hookah is popular, both in restaurants, although prices can be steep for college students, and at parties.
While most college students are too young to drink legally at bars, anyone over 18 can pay for a session with a hookah.
Stephen White , a freshman, began smoking the water pipe in high school, and continued the practice at college.
Unlike smoking cigarettes, which can be a solitary act, hookah-smoking is nearly always a social event. Some hookahs, including those rented at restaurants, have several hoses, allowing patrons to smoke simultaneously.
"It's relaxing," he said.
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@ globe.com 
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