How I, As A 21-Year-Old, Fell For Heroin

More and more I find that anything worth saying has already been said by some ageing rockstar wearing eyeshadow and an enormous pout. Case in point: Falling in love is so hard on the knees - Steven Tyler, vocalist for the band Aerosmith.

You're not wrong, Stevie.

I'm not disclosing any state secrets by telling you that love hurts. How can it not? You've served up your ridiculous and raw heart on a plate to someone who doesn't have an instruction manual, even if they care for you deeply. 

And some loves are more dangerous even than others. 

There is unrequited love. If you love someone who doesn't love you back, then you're well and truly ****** (we're not allowed to print this word but it rhymes with 'pfucked'). Worse is the pathological kind of love, when life is not worth living whether with or without the object of your obsession. I fell for heroin when I was twenty-one and it hurt so goddamn much it nearly killed me. 

I would get asked why all the time. "Why," friends and family would ask, "why have you fallen for a highly addictive opiate belonging to the same class of drugs as morphine, opium, and codeine?" I'm paraphrasing, obviously, just to give unfamiliar readers an idea of what heroin is. Usually it was more like "WHYYY? What the hell is wrong with you?! Stoppit, just STOP DOING THAT FILTH RIGHT NOW!" followed by sounds of nearby glass objects exploding. I'll skip the scientific reasoning because, frankly, all that stuff about limbic systems and dopamine receptors bores me to tears. Why does anyone ever do anything that may cause them harm? Because it feels good. Inhaling a tiny bit of melted brown powder off a strip of aluminium foil made me feel god-like. It was homecoming, it was completion, it was Kevlar for the soul. Nothing from the real world got through that. Not fear or sorrow or disappointment (nor joy or meaning either, but at the time I didn't care about all that). 

Hold on, though. Let's back up. You're probably thinking, "This guy's banging on about how good it felt once he did the heroin, but why do it in the first place? What a moron. I'm going to go read this week's excellent gadget reviews." 

Every junkie has a story which, at the root, is a story of escape most fantastic. How many times have you watched a rom-com movie and not thought, ooh kissing in the rain! I've got to get me some of that. And what, you've never wanted to wear a magic ring and frolic around Middle Earth beheading a fearsome orc or three? Drugs are a gateway to an altered reality, and by the time I went to college, I was primed for it. I'd read Burroughs and Welsh and Hunter S. Thompson. Stared at that Trainspotting poster, the one about choosing life, for hours. Orwell's Down and Out which, while not about drugs, is about squalor. That's what I wanted for myself aged seventeen. Just a hint of squalor, a darker thread to weave into my otherwise vanilla tapestry. Other people want to be able to tell their grandchildren stories of when they met Amitabh Bachchan. No thanks. I wanted to live stories of crooks and cops, of dirty deeds in piss-stinking urban ghettos, of communing with the moon, and forbidden sex. I wanted to know what hunger tasted of. 

It's cool if you can't relate to that, really - it was an utter mystery to me, too, how people could settle for stressful jobs, bland marriages, disposable income, commercial-breaks-only conversation, annual holidays, tax returns, and a peaceful cardiac arrest while asleep. 

The first beer in a dodgy dive on the outskirts of Bangalore was great. The second even better. From that point on I wanted it all. All the flavours of high. Were you ever a kid who's just finished her strawberry ice cream and then eyed the blackcurrant with intense longing? The only difference between that kid and me is that refined sugar will not make a train-wreck of your life quite so quick or as dramatically as certain drugs will. Oh, and also that I'm an addict by nature. If something gives me pleasure I will keep right on doing it and not give two ***** for the consequences (we're not allowed to print that word but it rhymes with 'phfuckx'). 

It took me a long while to understand that pleasure and happiness are not kin. That one is outlier and the other median; that one is a sharp spike on a wild Saturday night and the other a flat line running through your entire life. My twenties, a decade of promise by all accounts, had whooshed on past and I was too busy drinking, smoking, snorting, popping, dropping, or chasing to even wave goodbye. Want to know a few of the things I do remember from those years? I'll be brief. First, because I don't particularly enjoy dwelling on it, and second, because BUY THE DAMN BOOK! I remember beatings by the police, and the far more frequent and acute pain of heroin withdrawal. Stealing money, and selling stuff (sometimes other people's stuff) to get money. When there were no more things left to sell, I sold blood. Squatted for a thousand hours inside and outside public toilets of every description. Ate food out of a trashcan. My parents were forced to tell me to leave the house and it broke their heart. I lost all my friends. Had unprotected sex with almost-strangers (on the very rare occasion that my boy bits were even 'up' to the task). Put a girl I cared deeply for in danger multiple times. And etcetera.

I was thirty-one. I knew by then the taste of hunger. It tasted like desperation and I'd had enough. I wanted out. But where do you begin to change the only life you know? I'd tried to quit so often, in so many different ways, but always the drugs left behind a hole the exact size and shape as me. I was a shell. A ghost. By no laws of God or men did I deserve another chance. 

And yet.             

In a nameless valley of the Malang Mountains outside Mumbai there is a place called Land. Heroin junkies, wrist-slashers, and assorted misfits from everywhere - the fortunate ones - drift to its gates. At Land, these dirty secrets of the world, the refugees from planet normal, meet a man. Back in the eighties, the news dailies used to call him Dr. Yusuf Merchant; I call him Bhai or simply, Doc. He uses ordinary tools - love, kindness, gratitude, generosity - extraordinarily well. I know how much he dislikes hearing anyone say, "Doc saved my life." I mean, he really really doesn't like it. So I'll just say that Doc saved my life and leave it at that.

Is being sober difficult? Sure. It's about as hard, especially in the early days, as living in a country where they speak a different language and you have no friends or a single clue about what you're supposed to be doing there. At Land, over sixteen months, I re-learned things in which most toddlers are expert. How to talk to someone, and laugh. How to have full days and restful nights. How to listen to a song with your whole body. I made new friends whose language I could understand. I surprised myself by having fun. I found my own (highly peculiar) brand of faith. Gradually this once-alien country called Sobriety began to feel a lot like home.                                        

So now I'm an ex-junkie with a big mouth. So? Why should you care? Because odds are that you, or somebody you're fond of, has similar troubles. I don't mean drugs alone. Drugs (and other addictive substances such as booze, gambling, pornography, food, shopping, work, working out, gaming, and the Facebook app) are a symptom, not a cause. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness can bring us to our knees as inevitably as any drug...and yet we don't talk about it. Look, there are several things about India and being Indian that I love (the panipuri at Bengali Market, for one), but our inability to share our problems openly is not one of them. Whether it's a divorce in the family or an attempted suicide or an eating disorder, we bury our secrets in dank, dark places so they can grow like poisonous mushrooms. Why? Is it that we fear a loss of face, or shy away from the judgement of other people? If it was a choice between keeping my illusions of izzat intact, and finding a way out of crippling unhappiness, I know which I would choose every single time. Because the ways of healing are many, and all of them begin with an act of sharing. 

Self Help 101: Grab  hold of someone today. Your mum, your sister, your neighbour. Your dog Eddie. Tell them something you've never told anyone before. Who knows, it might just make your day. And if not, then, at the very least, you will have weaved yet another awkward moment into your rich and rainbow tapestry.          

(Arjun Nath is the author of White Magic: A Story of Heartbreak, Hard Drugs and Hope, which you can order here. He lives in New Delhi and can be reached at nath.arjun@gmail.com)

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