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.