Story Of A Weird (Weed) Night

(All characters in this story are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance to anyone. The story is purely imaginative and not meant to allude to any particular incident.)

Those days I was in Navi Mumbai. A few months earlier I had joined a very reputed pharmaceutical company in the city. Along with me sixty other young people had joined as part of an on the job professional training program.

I stayed with four of my colleagues. We had rented a small two bed room duplex house. I, Joy, Raj, Sanju were the first people to move in. Balu joined us a month later. His sister and her family were staying nearby, and he had put up at their place for the first few days. Balu moved into our house with an old bamboo cane sofa set, which was lying unused at his sister’s.

Our house had a hall, a kitchen and a big bath room on the ground floor. A flight of stairs on the inner wall led to the first floor where there were two bedrooms and a small bath room. There was a big veranda attached to the bigger bedroom. It was my favorite place to relax.

Joy was a stout and chubby guy. He was fun loving; bong by origin, but hailing from Gujarat. He loved food and would go to any extent to have good food. Every Sunday he would leave early in the morning, and roam around malls and shopping centers in various parts of Mumbai. Then he would find out a hotel that hosted a buffet, have his fill and come back. In the evening he would come back with stories of extraordinarily cooked tandoori, or a perfect glass of mocktail. He was a gadget lover too and preferred to be on the right side of the current trend.

Raj, the guy from Dehradoon, was a quite fellow, with dreamy eyes. You wouldn’t even realize his presence if his phone was kept in the silent mode. He had two mobile phones, one to receive missed calls from his girl friend and the other from which he made the calls. One or the other would always engage one charging point in the house. Nevertheless he would join in for any adventure or fun, and I liked him for that.

Sanju was a funny guy. He was an amiable fellow, a good singer, a simple guy who spoke fast and in a rather excited voice. He would sometimes hang his mobile phone from a band around his neck, and push it inside his inner wear to prevent its theft. He had an infectious laugh. I, Sanju and Raj, shared the same taste in cigarettes, Gold Flake.

Balu was a tall lanky fellow, with a baritone voice of extraordinary quality. I always felt he could have made his name in the theatre. But instead he chose to sit in our hall, and discuss worldly affairs, the effect of which would be greatly irritating, especially if it was late in the night. But it was good to have his sofa in our living room. We would use it for our telephonic conversations late into the night. I had also made some improvisations to use it as a bench for my weight training.

Joy had a number of relatives in Mumbai. He would visit them and tell us about the fabulous food he had, refrigerators full of chocolates in their house and such other things. Once he told us about his rich uncle who had a son, his cousin. This cousin was older than Joy and was a rock star in the making. Joy told us he would always be high on weed and sit in his room playing or listening to rock music.

We challenged Joy that he was telling lies. He had no such drug addict cousin and that he was making up stories. We dared him to bring us some of the stuff if at all what he said was true. All said and done, we had forgotten this entire episode, until one Saturday evening when Joy came up to us and showed us a packet. It was a small zip lock bag containing a single pellet of a grayish stuff. He said it was high quality ganja; he had borrowed from his cousin.

Ganja, cannabis, hashish, weed are the various names by which this narcotic goes.I had tried this stuff once or twice, during my hostel life, but had never really got any kick out of it. Even Raj said he had had a similar experience. I believed that either the guy who sold us the stuff, had sold us poor quality stuff, or it does not have any effect on me.

“Just this one pellet?” we exclaimed.

We hurled expletives at our chubby roommate for having brought such a stingy amount.

“This is useless, it will have no effect at all”, Sanju declared.

“You stupid fellows, you have this first, then I will see where all your bravery goes. But I am warning you before hand, don’t ask me for help when all of you are screwed up”, so saying, Joy handed us the packet and went upstairs.

The three of us got down to business immediately. Balu didn’t smoke. He sat on the sofa, with an elderly air and looked curiously at what we three were up to.

“This is too less for rolling up even a single joint”, Sanju said.

Raj said,” Let’s do one thing. Let’s not use up the entire stuff in a single joint. We will keep half for the night. Let’s mix the remaining with the filling of a cigarette and make the joint.”

So, I emptied a Gold Flake with care so as not to puncture the paper body at any place. I took the tobacco filling on a paper, mixed half of Joy’s stuff into it, by pressing it gently between my fingers. Then using a small paper spatula and a toothpick, I packed this spiked filling back into the paper casing of the cigarette. Our joint was ready. The three of us quivered with anticipatory excitement. Let’s see what trip this joint takes us to, we thought.

The cigarette was lit, and passed around after each puff. The packing of the cigarette matters a lot for it to taste good. I for instance have always found broken or folded cigarettes very bad tasting. Air pockets inside a cigarette make it very bitter and I hated the loathsome taste. The packing of this joint too had not been very good, but still, considering the adventure potential of the stuff inside it, we finished it off, taking slow but deep puffs and holding the smoke inside for some time.

Nothing happened. Damp squib again, I thought.

We went upstairs. Joy was sitting with his laptop, chatting with someone and smiling to his own self. We kicked him on his wide back side and hurled the choicest expletives for making fools of us.

Joy asked,” Did you have it?”

We nodded in the affirmative.

He just smiled and said, “Do you want some music?”

We sat down on his bed. This was the smaller of the two bed rooms. Joy and Sanju shared this room. They had their beds made out on the floor. Joy connected his MP3 player and put on some music. It was rock, metal he explained. I did not like this type of music, so when my phone rang out, I went downstairs to converse with the friend who had called.

How long I had been on the phone, I don’t remember. I remember the continuous cacophony of the unearthly noise from Joy’s MP3 player, mixed with Sanju’s laughing, and Balu’s deep baritone in the background as I spoke into the phone.

After sometime Joy started calling out my name, “Hey Abhi come and see what’s happening.”

I ignored, thinking he might just want to show me some funny You-tube video. I was in no mood to fool around. So I didn’t go upstairs and kept lying on the sofa. But he kept on calling me. Finally giving in to his replentless yelling I went upstairs. The music was still blaring; Joy was sitting with a disturbed look on his face. Balu and Sanju were sitting on the bed and smiling. Sanju looked at me and winked. Raj was sitting in one corner of the room and was head banging in rock star fashion. He was smiling.

I understood that these guys were playing a prank on Joy, so I left and again went downstairs. Within five minutes, Joy started shouting in his shrill voice. This time Sanju too was calling out to me. I went upstairs again. Raj was standing on the bed and head banging with full vigor. Something was not right, I felt. It didn’t look normal. He still wore that stupid smile on his face.

“Raj, it’s enough, stop it”, I said.

No reaction.

“Switch off that god-forsaken noise”, I told Joy. 

The music was switched off. But this had no impact on Raj; he continued what he was doing, only faster. I slapped him on his face- no reaction at all. He was still smiling stupidly and jerking his head. It looked as if he was in a trance, possessed by a spirit. The way he was jerking his head, I was afraid it might come off his torso. We forced him to sit on the bed and tried to talk him out of it, but to no avail. He was on a completely different plane; our words did not reach him. Now I was getting worried. I looked at the watch, it was ten thirty already.

“We have to call in a physician, guys”, I announced.

“No way. We can’t call anyone. If any one comes to know of this, we will get into trouble”, said Balu.

What he said was correct, our neighbors would not find it very funny, if they came to know we were experimenting with hash.

“Shit! it’s already ten thirty, or I would have gone to my sister’s house. You guys could have done whatever you wanted”, Balu spoke again. He was getting on to my nerves.

I was totally clueless what to do. I had no prior experience with this kind of situation. And if we did not do something quickly, Raj might definitely fall ill. At that moment I remembered that one of my friends was well known for being a very ‘adventurous’ sort of person. Why not ask him, I thought, he might suggest what’s best. So I called up Rakesh and told him about our predicament. He laughed out loud and said, 

“It is normal dude, just take off his clothes, and put him in the shower. Try to make him to lie down after that. Don’t let him get out of the house under any circumstance. That can be dangerous.”

We struggled to make Raj to stand. He was still smiling stupidly and moving his head. While the other three held him tightly so that he can’t move his head, I undressed him to his birthday suit and then took him to the bathroom. We held him under the cold shower. As the cold water hit his face, he resented it. He tried to force his way out of the shower but we managed to hold him. Finally he stopped resisting, and after a full five minutes of drenching, he said in a weak voice,

“Okay guys that’s enough, I am fine.”

We let out sighs of relief. Finally we were able to restore him to normalcy. I thanked God that he spoke. I had already started cursing myself for entering into what was rapidly turning into a misadventure.

Raj seemed very weak. The vigorous activity of the last hour had sapped him of all energy it seemed. We dried him with a towel. I dressed him up in his pajamas and T-shirt. We wrapped him up in a blanket and made him lie down. I rubbed his palms and the soles of his feet with my hands to generate some warmth. Raj went to sleep.

I had just started feeling relieved, when I observed that I had a strange sensation in my chest. I felt as if something was sitting tight on my chest constricting my chest cavity. I was taking shorter breaths, my chest felt heavy and my head felt lighter. I could see Joy talking excitedly, but his voice seemed to come from a distance. My conscious mind told me something was terribly wrong. I looked at Sanju. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, with a worried expression on his face. I gestured questioningly at him. He pointed at himself and then drew a line in the air across his own neck. I understood, he too was losing it. There was not much time to lose.

“We must immediately go to bed”, I said out aloud.

I went down and put the main door under lock and key. Then I locked the door leading out to the veranda. Joy asked me why I was doing all this. Sanju answered,

“Do as he is telling. I think we are also losing our sense. If we both lose it, it will be difficult for you to control us.”

“Whatever we do, just don’t let us out of the house”, I told Joy. “And today we will all sleep together in this bedroom. No one leaves this room”, I added.

Balu was not happy at all. But the prospect of having to control me (a ninety kilogram guy) gone berserk, later in the night, made him stow away his doubts. He complied without any argument.

Without losing any more time, the four of us lay down beside Raj. I checked out his condition before sleeping. Yes he had regained warmth and was sleeping peacefully. Thus assured I lay down with the others.

I still had that feeling in my chest, and it seemed more pronounced. In order to divert my mind, I started conversation with Joy.

I asked him, “What happened to Raj?”

“He was listening to the psychedelic rock music and started head banging with its beats. He just continued doing it. After smoking weed, you tend to keep on repeating what you are doing. You lose control of yourself, it’s like entering a trance”, Joy said.

“Actually he was trying to scare Joy at first. But even I failed to understand when his fake trance transformed into real drug induced trance”, said Sanju.

At last everything was under control I thought. I was feeling happy. My head was light and there was a sense of light heartedness inside me. I started whistling a tune. Sanju caught the tune and started singing. I added my voice to his. Our voices reverberated in the still atmosphere of our bedroom. I liked the sensation.

Joy whispered to Balu,” Forget about sleep now. These two have lost it. They will not stay quiet now.”

I heard what he said and smiled. I did not care anymore, neither did Sanju. We sang one song after another, I don’t remember for how long. 

In the morning I woke up the earliest. My throat was parched. I took a long drag of water out of the bottle kept beside the bed. I remembered what had happened last night. I thanked the heavens for taking us safely through the night. I checked Raj, he was fine. Sanju was sleeping like a baby. Balu and Joy too were asleep. I pulled the sheet over my head and flopped down to sleep again.

The Kingdom Where I Belong

“The journey is coming to a close, the adventure is about to end, and in three days’ time, we will be going back to our respective houses, where we will embrace our families, see our children, read through the correspondence that has accumulated in our absence, show off the hundreds of photos we’ve taken, tell our stories about the train, the cities we passed through and the people we met along the way.

And all to convince ourselves that the journey really did happen. In another three days’ time, once we’re back in our daily routine, it will feel as if we had never left and never made that long journey. We have the photos, the tickets, the souvenirs, but time – the only, absolute eternal master of our lives – will be telling us: you never left this house, this room, this computer.”

I read these lines out of Paulo Coelho’s Aleph. The words were really meaningful to me at that moment, considering I had just arrived at Hyderabad after a tiring but pensive journey of over thirteen hours. I had gone home to attend the last rites of my deceased grandmother. Returning from home is always a very emotional affair, it always has been, since the last fourteen years. Since after finishing school, I have always stayed away from home. It is people like me who can really appreciate how good it feels to be ‘home’ and also how sad and strange it feels to be a ‘guest’ in your own home.

Having stayed away from home the last fourteen years, I have come to think of myself as a ‘Lone Wolf’. By virtue of having stayed with my family in Bhutan half my life (during school days), and the other half away from my family; I never got more than a couple of weeks or at the most a month to spend with my close relatives, every year. Yet, there have been lean years like the time when I was doing my masters; I came home after an year and eight months. My family and relatives have always wondered with awe (and also some sympathy), how I stay away, all by my own, far away from my own home and my own city. I have always secretly prided myself for being on my own, taking my own decisions and making my own mistakes. But of late I am suddenly finding all of it meaningless.

The fact which I find most funny about my condition, that I also joke about with my friends is that where I stay, I do not belong; where I belong, I do not stay; where I officially belong, I actually do not belong; yet, where I actually belong, documentarily I do not belong there. Is it very complex? No wonder I too find it mind scrambling sometimes. Actually I always feel like a foreigner, wherever I go. When I stayed in Bhutan, I did not belong there; when I came back to India, people thought (and I too thought) practically I belonged to Bhutan, that is I did not belong here. Since then I have stayed in three different states in India, all places where I really do not belong, yet when I go home to my ‘own’ place; other than my family and outside my house, I know no one, no one knows me, in short I do not belong there too.

Yes, I know, it is indeed very confusing.  

I have never really spent much time thinking about my relatives ever, my maternal uncles, my father’s sisters and their families. Not that I am averse to them or something like that; it’s just that it never occurred to me. After my marriage it surprised me no end to see my wife’s numerous relatives strewn across the city of Jaipur, not only her own uncles and aunts, but her parents’ uncles, their kids, the kids’ in laws and such other far off and complicated relations. All these people were there to attend our marriage reception. In the beginning it was really baffling for me, how can people maintain such distant relationships, it is something I never could comprehend at that time. I myself cannot think further than my own maternal and paternal uncles and aunts, forget their families and their further branches. Even among these few people, other than my uncle Boro Kaku, I have never really interacted with the others on a regular basis, since the last ten to twelve years.

My last trip home brought an altogether different realization with it. As I mentioned earlier, I had gone home to attend the final rites of my deceased grandmother. She had passed away last month peacefully, at the age of eighty four. Since she was staying with my parents at that time, all the rituals were carried out at our home. All our relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, their families came to attend the last rites. It was the first assembly of its kind in our home. Having stayed away from home most of the time, I my sister and our parents have always ‘attended’ such congregations, this was the first time we were hosting one.

The house was teeming with people, relatives of all sizes and names. There was so much activity; rituals going on one side, food being prepared on the other; oldies were catching up with one another, bursting out in laughter once in a while at old anecdotes. The younger ones, my brothers and cousins had their own secret agenda, slinking in and out of the house silently in a group now and then as if plotting some secret mission. In short the house was buzzing with activity. I always shun such large gatherings, unless it is imperative. But seeing my wife enjoying this big gathering, easily mingling with all these people and being happy, I too thought of giving it a try.

Withdrawing my ‘self’ out of all this commotion, I tried to view all that was going on with a purely objective view. I tried to notice each interaction between these 30 odd people, as they were; without any bias in my mind. The kids were having a whale of a time. Seeing them I remembered my own childhood visits to Boro Kaku’s house. I and my cousin Saurabh played cricket in the veranda all day long. Sometimes he would cheat and we would get into arguments leading to stoppage of play. We wouldn't even speak to each other for a couple of hours thence. Sometimes our noise would disturb Boro Kaku’s siesta; he would wake up and give both of us a sound spanking each and send us off to sleep. I remembered the impish face of little Saurabh and could not restrain a smile.

My wife was moving in an out seamlessly from one interaction to another. No one could say that she comes from an entirely different culture with an entirely different mother tongue.  She has already managed to endear herself to all the elders in the family. I could not but wonder how she managed to do so much, in so less time. My aunts, older cousins, all were full of praise for my wife. They patted her on the head, blessed her with all their heart. This interaction, as insignificant as it maybe, brought smiles and a feeling of happiness to all their faces. I understood that this is also something that I have missed most of my life and have been keeping away from, the rest of it.

In the evenings after the day’s work, everybody assembled in the bedroom. There, amidst laughter aplenty, caused by Boro Kaku’s antics and hilarious jokes, we had our evening tea. Twenty odd people sat huddled against one another under a large blanket, having tea and sharing old stories, told and heard hundreds of times. Stories of my uncle’s college life, my father’s bachelor life, or my aunt’s school life. I have heard these stories many times before, yet this particular instant it seemed very special. I suddenly realized, this is where people belong. Not in the city or village, or the work place, people belong in the memories, in the stories that are shared over and over again. I understood I have found the answer to one question, “Where I really belong?”

By the time I realized as much, it was already time to bid adieu. The ceremonies were over; it was time everybody returned to their respective houses, families and work places. The heaviness in my heart due to the realization of what I had neglected all these years, made me very sad. This parting seemed more painful than the numerous such others before. My wife’s parting tears shed in my aunt’s embrace did not help either. So with a heavy heart, we left, for our routine lives. Seven days of pure unadulterated happiness just came to an end.

I felt as if my late grandmother had blessed me with this new realization from the heavens. It is a parting gift she left me, to make me a better person, understand myself better.

I felt very sad for the first two days after returning to Hyderabad. But just as Paulo says, in three days time life has again come back to normal, as if nothing happened, I never left this place, I didn’t go home at all. It is as if there is no change at all. The only change being the realization of the importance of family and relations and where I actually belong. In Paulo Coelho’s words,

“Two weeks? What’s that in a whole lifetime? Nothing has changed in the street, the neighbours are still gossiping about the same old things,………., the latest celebrity scandal, the constant complaints about the things the government promised to do, but hasn’t.

No nothing has changed. But we – who went off in search of our kingdom and discovered lands we had never seen before – we know we are different.”