I really can’t remember how we first scored. It has to be from Old Delhi, I suppose. That is where we started scoring from in the beginning. Someone must have tipped us off. It is pretty openly done around that area anyway. Junkies sit with their foils and run lines, usually covering their heads with a cloth, in the corridor that houses the LIC building and stretches from Ramlila Maidan to Delite Cinema.
On the other side of the road lies the GB Pant hospital. The bus stop next to it teemed with junkies as well. This entire region is like the junk capital of Delhi.
We must have asked someone we spotted with a foil or something to get it for us. This is the least effective way of scoring. Junkies are bastards and they have no conscience. They will take your money, ask you to wait and run away with it. Or else, they would give you dirt packed neatly in small bits of paper. This happened a lot to us initially. But we had to go through it as we had no direct contact with those who sold the stuff.
We were really desperate too. To go there and return without scoring was a soul destroying thing. One such night I remember vividly. We had gone there in the evening and left the auto at Zakir Hussain College, which lies close to GB Pant hospital. We walked past the stable, with the horses neighing at the setting sun with a dreary melancholy, the wafting smell of beef being fried on the other side of the road in small stalls – for two rupees you could get quite a lot of it. Snacking on Old Delhi delicacies like this was a pleasant part of the scoring process.
By then, we knew this guy who lived in Ram lila Maidan and sold stuff. It was Robi who knew him basically. Robi led these expeditions, so to say. We first checked for him next to bus stop outside GB Pant but he wasn’t there. So we went and looked for him at Ram lila Maidan. Not to be found. We went to his house next.
After walking the impossibly narrow and dirty alleys of old Delhi’s slums, with open sewers on both sides, people looking at you suspiciously – we stood out of course, in our clean middle class clothes and appearance; somehow, we reached our contact’s house. Robi called him out but no one responded. So we walked inside, climbing a small and decrepit flight of stairs. His wife and kids were inside but they had no clue about his whereabouts so we got the hell out of there.
On our way out we met someone who said he could score for us.
We trailed behind him. We did not offer him money upfront. He said that was fine. That he would take it once we were close. “A lot of people will take your money and run away. I am not like that. I can see that you need the stuff. Don’t worry, I will get it for you,” he said. Of course, since there are no free lunches in world, we were prepared to give him one pudiya out of what he scored for us.
After some more walking in those lanes – it was already dark by now – we reached another old, ramshackle house. Standing at the door, he asked us to wait outside. We saw no reason to suspect him – he had to come out the same door – so we gave him the money.
Minutes passed. We stood outside, smoking, avoiding direct eye contact with passersby. Half and hour and he still didn’t come out. We began to get restless. Finally, Robi walked in and I followed behind. We came across a large courtyard with no one in it. The door to the house was in the center of the courtyard and it was closed. The bastard had slipped through another small opening between the wall of the house and the wall of the courtyard.
Desolate and desperate, we went back again to GB Pant, swearing to beat up the guy if we ever managed to catch hold of him.
It had begun to drizzle by now. But we didn’t care. We wanted to score at any cost. We asked around again. We still had a hundred rupees left. Enough for two pudiyas.
It was then that we came across the one eyed Bengali man who sold bananas or something during the day and got high on smack at night. He said he knew where to get the stuff from. We tagged along. Just behind Zakir Hussain College was a park. The boundary wall to the park was broken and junkies were going in to get their fix. The Bengali asked someone to get two pudiyas for us and told him we will pay once he got it. That man never came out again.
I am not sure how we scored finally but we did. The pockmarked face of the Bengali has somehow stayed with me after all this years, like a living nightmare. Just like junk is.
We immediately went inside the Sulabh loo next to the stable, got inside one of the stinking latrines, the inside of the commode caked with shit – we could not care less. Robi took out a foil and we chased some lines before getting out and hailing a rickshaw, drenched in the rain and the over powering relief that junk gives you, by now. Of course, since we had no money left, we had to drop the rickshaw in JNU near Ganga Dhaba, tell him we would be back after buying cigarettes and disappear.
No comments:
Post a Comment