This isn't insignificant

14 june...
I'm sitting at my friends place. There are five of us. All of us are dead silent. Nobody speaks for 30 minutes. We've come here after a hiatus of 45 days. Have i become this shallow? I begin to question my conscience. How can impending exams be a justifiable excuse. One of us musters up all the courage and goes to my friends father to console him. His mother comes in and starts crying the instant she sees us.

flashback....
2 may
By brother comes running in and says something to my mom. All i hear is a loud "WHAT" from her. My friend has committed suicide. Its the "rope around the neck and dangle till you run outta breath" routine. It becomes a herculian task for me to hold a book in my hand. Inspite of this i dont go to his place. It's exam time and i cant concern myself with the trauma and anguish that this incident had brought. Why...maybe b'cos he wasn't that close a friend or maybe i'm just too apathetic.

I do make it a point to go when i'm done with my exams. For a normal guys it would be the very next day. For me takes 14 days. The days b'for this was spent in getting wasted and having a ball of a time. Its only when i go there do i realize the gravity of the situation. One of my friend is dead and thats a fact. And cliched as it may be nothing that i say is gonna change that fact.

I'm left with one question though...why do people commit suicide. No one knows why my friend took such a drastic step and i guess we'll ever know. He took all the answers along with him to the grave. Whats rionic about this whole deal is the amount of courage it requires to put a rope around your neck and hang yourself and the lack of it to contemplate such an act in the first place.

High on grass

Statutory warnings apart I’d say one should take in Hallucinogenic substances at least once in his life. “Unfortunately no can be told what the” after effects are,”you have to see it for urself”. This is what happened to me after having 12 glasses and 4 bars of bhaang.

It all began the night b’for holi. 20 lts of milk was brought from my friend’s canteen (Later that friend of mine would end up consuming half of it.)
This was to become the primary ingredient for making thandai: a glorified name for bhaang. We also had boxes full of sweets which had 80 % bhaang and the rest I guess was cow manure cos that is what it looked like. Since the other 80 % was consumable we didn’t bother about the looks. Anyway, the next day after the obligatory color bath we sat down to consume what we had so painfully prepared the night before. It didn’t take us long to finish it. Apart from the slight burning sensation in our throat everything else went down quite smoothly. Having 8 glasses of that thing made me feel proud (it’s a guy thing- a natural tendency to show the world that nothing can happen to us).

At this moment a friend of mine had an urge to meet his girlfriend. I tagged along. It was a good five mins walk ( 5 mins is a long time when ur feet aren’t touching the ground) so my friend thought of enlightening me about the benefits of being in a relationship and how I should swallow my ego and approach …….. (name withheld). All along the way we were given weird looks by everyone around. This didn’t come as a surprise cos we both were quite aware of our appearance. It took time to figure out that it wasn’t our appearance that was drawing attention but the way we were traversing the road.

5 mins later…
We were now standing below her window, waiting for her to show up. My friend curled up his sleeve to look at his watch. Now this was weird for 2 reasons
1. he was wearing a half sleeved shirt
2. he wasn’t wearing a watch.
Realizing what he was doing he suddenly stopped midway and looked at me. I started laughing and so did he. One thing you should know about bhaang is that once you’ve had enough of it you tend to loose ur sensibilities and end up doing embarrassing shit you wouldn’t even send to “MAX EX”. Which is probably why you should never do the Macarena after having it. Anyway, our hysterical laughter continued.

Another 5 mins later...
We were still laughing. Luckily no one coughed up blood or died of asphyxiation due to excessive laughter. After what seemed like an eternity the girl finally came to the window. But without paying much heed to us she started putting up clothes for drying. It's weird how quickly expressions change. Cos my friend who was uptil now using 17 of his muscles to laugh suddenly started using the other 43….to frown. He couldn’t call out her name as her sardar father would have stuck a 6 foot sword in our less than 6 foot frame. Our quest thus ended on a tragic note.

On our way back we met a couple of friends who were on a quest of their own; a quest to fill their raging hunger. We decided to raid a sweet shop. After half an hour of unparalleled assimilation (very different from eating) of food, we came out with filled stomachs and empty pockets. Next stop water sports. We found some water sprinklers doing what they are supposed to do with mechanical perfection and decided to interfere. The idea was to wash of the excessive color; we ended up washing off a little more than we had bargained for. Standing with our face right in the jet stream made us realize how stoned we were. Although what we were doing was not a very civic thing to do we couldn’t stop ourselves. Standing there for 15 mins did make our head feel a lil bit lighter but our water soaked clothes compensated for it in more ways than one. Completely drenched the 4 of us decided to go home.

In spite of taking every precautionary steps conceivable the first thing my mom asked me was the no. of glasses of bhaang that I had. I didn’t answer her, I just smiled; a smile that stayed with me the entire day.