Weedless

By Graheet Shenoy

Resuscitated by a raging roommate from the realms of deep reflection on the astuteness of life, I was shook awake head-to-toe. Yesterday, lady sleep had removed my existence from her night planner and only after binging 2 series: half each and enjoying quietly the guilty pleasure of sucking on my ‘scoot’: a contorted cigarette fresh out of my jacket’s inner pocket roughly around 3 in the almost morning-night could I finally get some shut eye.

“Scoot” - the jargon was a gift from the mallu gang. They had either made it up or had picked it from andamanis (ones that are usually responsible for such creative lexicon). In any case it is extremely fun to use.

Scoot means a souvenir lifted unbeknownst to your comrades that of course, was meant to be shared amongst you all equally. A scoot can be anything that you have kept for yourself ranging from that one halwa from the buffet you hid to be relished later, the half bit chocolate wrapped back again and thrown into your vanity bag saved for winter or if you are one of us it is most definitely - cancerous bad breath causing health hazard known as cigarette.

Cigarettes, by the love of god are the best add-ons ever imagined for any sort of addiction. Be it drugs, pain or simply life, you can always count on these little grips of death rolled in a neat slow-burning paper, even though short lived; to definitely bring you the solace that lasts longer than itself. It is freedom between one's fingers, a wish, a death wish. But a wish YOU made. It is not one of those things the world dictates you into compliance. It is not something you do just because you have to feel like a contributing part of the society in order to keep going, for the illusion of mattering by playing the part. It is a cigarette, you smoke and then you die. Nothing more nothing less.

I was awake, laying in pretense of sleep but awake… or at least I hope I was awake. The neat line of reality is contorted when getting high becomes the only event in your entire life that you can manage to remember. I read somewhere that the common side effects of weed is giving up on the illusion that is time. Time - desperate numbers that direct a bunch of desperate marionettes to act in the most outlandish way to finally make just above the line of mediocrity. The war of time and mine is not a recent endeavor. It has existed for ages. Time, the lecherous monster that he is, slips away every time I want him around my arms but makes himself abundantly available in places you wished to god, time slipped. Like a room full of baby boomers that amounted to nothing their whole lives lined up in front of you to strip each one of your life choices and dispense their gavel of judgment upon it .

I was in an arm wrestle with time this time to give me some sleep and let me marinate in my dream world and make belief. Way before jaanemann, my roommate, sometimes called 'jaan' woke me up. It is a routine he follows, waking me up with his discombobulated self and a slurring tone that warns me - “we’ll be late if you don’t get up”. The only reason I have succeeded in decoding his sluggish sleepy blabber that sounded as if an old man was gargling pebbles and trying to talk at the same time was because I have been hearing the same words uttered into my ears daily for the past 392 days. Funnily enough neither he ever stops nor I ever wake up on time. Because I see no point in waking up to the dullness of a repetitively boring life. There is always something we’ll be late for: the college, a movie, a date I'm to third wheel and this time it was probably the sesh. We are always late anyway, we live in Bengaluru. So, as usual trying to cash in on the borrowed time between my actual wake and the time jaan usually wakes me up, an attempt to sleep a little more was made and as usual it bore no fruit. Today is Sunday and I swear, the entire day shall solely be dedicated to sleep and nothing but sleep. But to make that possible, smoking up is imperative.

-

It is now 10:47 AM, almost 2 hours from when we reached here in hopes of getting stoned out of our brains and play pub-g mobile on the emulator. On our way here we had a bet, jaan and I. He said he could exactly count all the mallus that visited and departed the room. I said that it is humanly impossible as their prestige is a mystery that will remain unsolved. But we all know mallus only visit areas crowded with stuff and talentless artists. None of which were here today.

I lean and cup my ears from the washroom to find out that the peddler is not picking up. 'The two' that have always been responsible for financing and acquiring the stuff for the gang are now demanding more ‘contri’. They plan on buying weed from a guy that had arranged for us in the past from another guy he knew, when all hope seemed lost. But he is known to skim off some for himself and charge double. So naturally there is some resistance from the concerned parties who are not ready to spend more over a scanty and “left asking for more” kind of bliss. After a short back-and-forth, ‘the two’ finally concede and turn to me, I turn to jaan and our telepathic conversation begins -

“ We have already given them the usual amount. If there is a need for more, then we must all pitch in equally”

“yes, I know... but it is what it is, don’t make a thing and just pay alright?.. I've done it too... haven’t I?”

Nodding my head I oblige, knowing very well that the money I am giving now making up for the freeloaders’ share will never be reimbursed in case we do not get the score today.

The crushed notes collected from all the members have been stacked and placed in the room's epicenter, near which stands an unexploited bong and a lighter that has given up. Surrounding it are us, the members of today’s session.

The room, my BFAM’s, is a small hall with a connected bathroom. It has transcended all forms of suffocation far even from the Führer’s best wet dreams, as it has accommodated 11 sweaty, stinky lads with the windows shut and a dead ceiling fan that circulates more noise than it does air.

Feet over each other’s crotches and hands on each other’s heads, we wait with bated breath pretending to use our phones all the while throwing a look at the bong in regular intervals and then at each other and back to our phones again.

Bong rests on the floor now, scooched a little to make way for more members that were summoned in a calculated move by the two to extract more contri. The bong is a semi-opaque maroon with trippy light red mushrooms sprouting all over it. It carries a lot of memories with it. A crack on the edge of its mouth symbolizes pointless fights I can't care enough to remember. The black tar in it, is a testament of our nonchalantly cool existence. Scratches all over it - war scars, show us that she is experienced and still carries magic with her.

She is our old gal. And she is always horny. Right now she is leering at us, spreading her legs. Shouting at us, she wants to be used, she is whispering each one of our names into our ears tempting us with the stench of uncleaned bong water. She is begging us to violate her orifice with all our lips one after the other and ignite her loins with the most potent bud of THC the humankind has ever known. Members blow an exasperated sigh in unison and go back to pretending that life has any other purpose except the high.

-

Take away addiction from an addict and the trivialities of life become buoyant. Food, water, pending assignments, nagging girlfriends- life and its burdens were slowly getting to us. Some fell victim and started scribbling on a piece of paper; their supposed assignments, some turned to dehydration and ingestion in an attempt to quench their thirst for weed and remedy their anxiety and I to the cigarette pack, I had had my eyes on for a while now; which was draining faster than our hopes. A brave soul even crushed the ‘tob’( tobacco used to cut the weed with) and smoked it on the bong. Out of sheer boredom everybody got in. After 2 rounds of tob-bongs, thundering coughs and tears the chance of us being able to ever be soothed by the most pristine boon earth has bestowed upon us was becoming bleeker.

Members had started scratching into each other's wounds solely to provoke one another and pull legs to start a fight. The perils of socializing without weed was barbaric and sad but thoroughly entertaining until of course it's you on the receiving end. We had all become broken shells of our past. A past when we were capable of having conversations without the need to intoxicate our korgs. That decent part of ourselves was so long gone only bits of words remained. So now and then, you could hear zombies that still wouldn't lift their heads from their phones screaming "So… how's life?". A bait in an ocean of uninterested fishes. In hopes of some dysfunctional cretin that might respond, " I SAID, HOW IS LIFE!" was heard followed by the previous how's life. None cared to respond but each one of us tried screaming "How's life" at some point.

-

The two had finally managed to convince the grievers that we would go with the guy who charged double. But it seemed that the devil was at play. It turned out that he too had been in constant search for a score, past days and had found not one single strand anywhere in the area. He even went on suggesting that we stop the search, get back to our homes and give up on our dreams. But quitting was not an option. Because the zombies in the room don't eat brains, we eat hope.!

Sun is slowly getting comfortably high in the sky and with scorching heat, increasing humidity and extreme joblessness comes extreme irritability. Humans lived in this room no more, we were now all growling strays, just one squabble away from mauling each other and hence a distraction was necessary. I paused the YouTube video of a comic that none of us or the audience were really listening to and went with Wiz khalifa’s ‘hopeless romantic’ for now and let YouTube’s autoplay deal with the further video recommendations for the day. We went on with today’s Battle Royale weedlessly.

-

An outlook of a typical group of stoners or any group that exceeds three for that matter might seem as an inseparable lot of friends. But is actually divided into tiny chunks of their own. Meaning, it’s not really a group of ten per se, it’s just a collection of duo and trio assembled together depending on the needs of the situation. Here in the room the gang was segregated into (‘the two’), (me, jaan and BFAM), (an appendix trio of the locals that giggled constantly at their internal jokes) and ( 3 mallus that kept changing according to their availability). Which meant that these inner circles had already started communicating with each other for their own arrangements of the maal and were working on devising a plan to retrieve their shares back from the stack.

The scene turns morbid. There is blood in the air now. A fictitious tumbleweed rolls with a trail of dust. It is a showdown. All zombies donned a cowboy hat and sharpened their eyesights towards the unprotected, open to attack stack of money. The alphas of the group moved towards the stash and recoiled immediately as if they were about to snatch their money back. When the rest of the hoard would panic, the alphas laughed at their little show of dominance. 'A jurk' it's called when a jerk pretends to do something the whole group is planning on doing but has refrained for humanitarian reasons. An in life scenario of 'jurk' would be when you witness a bully jurking a poor kid that's still learning to pedal on his tiny bicycle. The jurk resluts in the kid having a tiny heart attack / collapsing down, which would then be graced by smug smiles, howls and cult handshakes.

When the jurks don't seem to entice a breakout another tactic is used. Drama. Locals start complaining that their fat home food filled tummies have not had a refill in hours as the contri was their food money. After years of bullshit members have grown unfazed of such spineless attacks. One by one we roll our eyes and go back to our phones.

The volume of heat was turning down. Though time had become still for us, the sun had decided to descend, noon was slowly inching towards eve and we hadn’t been rewarded with a single sniff of weed yet. But jaan, being the slick cunt he always is, had somehow managed to convince this guy he knew to save at least 2 bong shots worth of stuff, "even scraps" he had begged on the phone so that we wouldn’t have to go sleep sober. He is a true miracle worker when it serves his needs. But the guy had agreed to salvage some for us only on the condition that we hurry and make it there in an hour’s time, as there were already too many hungry zombies in his own room.

Jaan texted me all this and before I could read and even construct a reply, had already started searching for the bike keys. I beckoned him of our share in the contri stack. But BFAM could be trusted with the safekeeping of our money and also to call us if the score ever happened.

-

It took us two and a half hours to reach the guy’s place as he had moved somewhere else. We had to track his new place down and because of this impromptu reroute our bike ran out of petrol. It was getting dark and the new area this guy had chosen to live in was deserted. There seemed no life existing anywhere near, no streetlights, hence we had to push our ride all the way to his room. The energy out of our smoke soaked, malnourished bodies had drained. We were now on autopilot and the only thing that kept us going was the yearning to get one, just one shot or puff or however the fuck way we could get weed into our systems.

Consumed by hyperventilation, a throbbing headache and profuse precipitation we make it to the 5th floor of the building.

Slashing through air and crowding zombies we jump into the guy’s room only to find the mother fucker burning the final shot in front of our eyes like a ravening animal. We look around for something holding our lives in our hands but he has scraped the stash to its bone, filled it and smoked it completely. He poses an awkward smile of pity and ridicule, pointing towards the empty zip-lock bag, looking at the poor plight of us neanderthals rummaging around his room completely weedless.

By Graheet Shenoy