New | Novel | Serialised Fiction | Junk Days | Abhimanyu Kumar | Part III

Artwork via Wikimedia 

 

 

This is a lament for you, Robindranath Mazumdar. You, of the gangster scowl, the grandfather glasses, the bitter pride.

What happened to us?

I sit thinking of you as the cold wind blows on my top floor apartment, I am alone, I am going to be thirty soon, half my life gone, amounting to nothing. Where are you tonight? Last I heard you were home, your dad wasn’t well. I hope he gets better. You will take good care of him if you want to. You have a kind heart. You hear cries that other miss, see humiliation before others do.

I went to your place once. Diamond Harbour. Your dad read the papers lying on his bed most of the time. Hardly spoke. Your mother cooked for you your favourite things. You did not like fish. And you loved eggs. You had told me about your mother’s mental problems. Just like with Ginsberg’s mother.  Both your parents retired, dad as a state telecom official, mother a schoolteacher.  We smoked up on the terrace and went through your National Geographic collection. Listened to Anjan Dutta. We met your friend who seemed a bit slow in his head and divine at the same time. The holy fool. Like Ramkrishna Paramhansa. I was glad but not surprised to learn that you two were the only friends of each-other in school. We ate jhaal-moori that evening, standing on an anchored boat next to the dock, as the clouds gathered on the horizon, politely, quietly, like people for a social occasion.

Your brother in the US. Married, settled. Studied engineering at Jadavpur.

I also came to know that some time back your father called the police on you. I do not know what it was about. Apparently, you two had quarreled and you had left home or something.

You were once my hero. I envied how cool you were.  With that casual approach towards violence that I found attractive. That lack of guilt. The easy self-righteousness.

We started getting close only after Manik left for home after he got busted. I think you dropped out of German the same year. You were lying in your bed, stoned, when a classmate came to advise you to get serious and you asked him to shove it.

I moved to Tapti hostel. You moved in with me. As an illegal guest, technically.

Manik had done smack just a few times with Roy and his Patna gang – all of them from Patna. Childhood friends. Except Roy, the others worked in call centers.

They knew Arun da and Amitabh Vishal, since these two hailed from Patna too. That is how we got to meet each-other I think. Amitabh, the common link between all of us, was the man about town in JNU, apart from being a Party comrade, and senior to us. He took me to have beef for the first time – Manik had it earlier though he came along. Arun da was also elder to us. He was not around most of the time because he worked the night shift at a call-centre.

 First time I met Roy it was in a room in Munirka. Near Arun da’s place. Roy and others had some hash they had bought from Munirka. It was really bad, mixed with shoe-polish. But we smoked it all, cursing the motherfucker who sold it.

Roy seemed self-contained. Like he did not really need the others although he benefitted from their help, like everyone else. He had the manly confidence of those who effortlessly attract women which he often did, from lady doctors to a girl sharing the seat in the bus by chance or standing in front in a queue.  

We started meeting more often, at Arun da’s place, the three of us. Arun da’s place was our hangout. He would leave his key with us when he went to office at night and we would stay there, smoking up and listening to music. Robi and I would take turns writing on Arun da’s computer. Amitabh would drop by at times, always bringing the hottest women in the campus with him. Sometimes, some of Arun da’s call-centre colleagues would come with girls and we had to vacate or simply move to the roof.

Somewhere along the line this time around came Daniel Muhammad Khan, or DMK.

DMK was from Bengal, Khidirpur, dock-er chele, as he always proudly mentioned. A street-smart thug. A junkie proper. Thin, metal chains on his body and over his colourful clothes, a pierced eyebrow and chin. Goa and Manali kid. DJ.

He worked in a call-centre too, probably with either Ranjan or Aditya, who made up Roy’s Patna gang.

DMK used to say he was working because he needed to buy the gear to become a full-time DJ. But all that was just jazz. Some people are junkies. They are professionals. Junk is what they do best. That is the life they know most intimately. DMK was one of them. Not everyone can be a junkie. Only the chosen few. Rest of us try and fail, deterred by society, and our own illusions. DMK worked to keep his habit.

With him, we took the plunge into the netherworld of smack for the first time. The shadowy world of narrow alleys and quick decisions. Of quiet recognition and bonds without words. The hell of no trust.

We used to gather at Arun da’s place. DMK used to score. He rarely failed. And he was the master of ceremonies. He would make the pipe, flatten the foil, melt the stuff and get everyone to do it by holding the foil and lighting it underneath.

He could talk. If he were off junk, he would talk on and on. It could be about anything, about Nirvana, about Goa, about hash. You could ask him to shut up. Scream at him but he won’t stop talking. But once he got some junk, he would take his shirt off, scratch and shut up like death.

Soon, we realised that DMK seemed to be the highest of all of us all the time although we apparently did equal share of the stuff. But that was not really true. Since DMK got everyone to do it, he would not allow people to complete their lines. He would always stop a little before, claiming that the user was wasting the stuff by blowing it. He would then complete the line. Secondly, we suspected that he already did some before he shared the stuff he had scored for which we used to pay.

Later, we would all do the same thing in different circumstances. But back then, this made us want to score our own stuff.