Most people that smoke weed will at some point in their lives experience a ‘whitey’. A ‘whitey’ creeps up on you. They’re stealthy. You hit the jazz woodbines. Just chilling. Then the cold, deathly clamminess arrives as your blood pressure drops and the blood drains out of the capillaries under you skin, leaving that shiny pallor. Dizziness and nausea follow. Before you know it you’re running to the bogs to talk on the great white telephone. If you try and lie down the world starts spinning like you’re riding the Gavitron at Parnham’s; the floor retracts and you helplessly stare at the vortex of your life below.
The worst ‘whitey’ I ever had was during pre-production on a commercial that was shooting in Mumbai. The locals laughed at me when I called it Mumbai. They all said Bombay. It was a stressful job that required the etherising properties of marijuana.
Our casting director was a recovering alcoholic, who had recently fallen off the wagon and could be found most nights drinking vodka and water in any one of Pali Market's numerous dive bars. I felt like he might know someone that could hook me up.
He sent me across town with Geetu, one of the local production coordinators. As we drove Geetu pounded the steering wheel, singing along to one of the big Indi-pop hits of the day, whose chorus went:
“I can feel your heart beat. Baby, I can feel your heart beat.”
An hour later I was sitting in a beautifully furnished duplex in Junta, belonging to a well known stylist.
She asked, “Have you smoked charas before? It's quite strong.”
In my mind I was all, “Don't worry about me, man, I’ve smoked plenty of charas. I’ve hot-knifed more hashish than most people have had hot dinners.”
In reality I said, “Once or twice I think. Maybe.”
“Well be careful if you're not used to it.”
I was staying at the Taj Lands End hotel in Bandra. After the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, security at all Mumbai hotels was tight. To get in and out of the Taj Lands End you had to pass through an airport-style screening complete with metal detectors and scanners. The property was also heavily policed by armed security guards. It was a hot place to bun one.
Charas has been smoked in India for thousands of years. It was only made illegal in 1985 under pressure from the United States. For many Indian sadhus it’s an integral part of their religious practice and is smoked in clay pipes called chillums, while chanting the many names of Shiva in veneration. I didn’t have a chillum so I went back to my room and wrapped up a spliff using part of a Gold Flake snout that I chipped off Geetu.
I noticed that there was a small woodland area opposite the hotel. There were three lanes of intense BJ Road traffic to negotiate, but on the whole it seemed like a mellow place to get stoned. I stashed the zoot in my shirt pocket and went down to the lobby, took all the shit out of my trouser pockets, put it in a tray, and passed through the metal detector. No beep beep. It was rush hour so BJ Road was hard to cross. I nearly got hit by a Tuk Tuk. I walked a little way into the woods until I was out of sight. I sparked the zoot and took a long, lung-deep drag. And exhaled. And then pulled on it again. Cough. And once more.
There’s always a precipitous moment after you smoke when you don’t quite know how the marijuana’s going to hit. I stood there transfigured, appreciably lighter, the soles of my shoes barely seeming to touch the ground. All was well until I tried to move. My legs would not do my brain’s bidding. My femur were like jellied eels encased in skin. I thought they might slither away under my weight. I now realised that I was calamitously stoned. The squeal of the traffic hit my eardrums, sending bad auditory vibes to my brain. I had to get away. I coaxed a stumble out of my lower limbs and moved deeper into the woods. I felt leaves under foot. And then I felt corrugated iron. I heard angry yelling in Hindi and became aware that I was standing on the roof of someone’s house. It started to bow. The yelling grew more insistent and ragged. I got scared and moved again, palsied and erratic. I felt the crunch of leaves once more before I lost my balance and fell down a steep verge into a clearing.
For some time I lay amongst the leaves and stared at the moon through the night’s formless shape. Whenever I closed my eyes, the moon remained there, baleful and ancient, pockmarked by craters, as if projected onto the inside of my eyelids. I lost all sense of distance. The moon was both near and far, but I was connected to it by a tunnel of vision made of pure time, whose walls were indistinguishable from the sides of my mind. The plaint of a rose-ringed parakeet reflected off the surfaces and echoed across millennia. The blood slowly drained from my body. I shivered and felt an unquenchable thirst. A terrible sickness.
Then, through tightly shut eyes, I saw the moon reform itself into the shape of a pale face from the past, an old English teacher, whose haughty cheekbones had the feverish glow of tuberculosis. His clipped voice asked me to read from ‘The Fire Sermon’, the third part of the ‘Wasteland’. I heard myself recite, “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives / Old man with wrinkled female breasts…” Snickering came from the back of the class. The teacher gave me an unpleasant grin. Rotten enamel etched each of his front teeth with a letter from the name, T.I.R.E.S.I.A.S. The whole construct of language, of systems of linguistic signs and symbols with their associated sounds and meanings, seemed completely alien. The word was not flesh. The letters lay dead. Meaningless. Baby, I can feel your heart beat. I sensed the painful loss of something I had put so much faith in.
A hand reached out of the night and started shaking my shoulder. I sat upright and saw a man crouching. I wondered whether I had been asleep. He was wearing a lungi and a loose fitting beige shirt unbuttoned to his navel. I could see the loose folds of skin hanging from his chest like dugs. His eyes were pearly and opaque from cataracts, covered in a rheumy film. He stared at me, unseeing, and handed over a cup of home-made palm wine. It was bitter but refreshing. Beep beep. A blare of Tuk Tuk horns. I realised that I was not lost in the depths of a woodland; the roadside was only ten metres away. I tried to thank the man, but wasn’t able to form any intelligible sounds. Baby, I can feel. I crawled up the incline and sat down on the curb.
The traffic on BJ Road crashed past. All three lanes of it. Beep beep baby. While the apex of stoned had passed I was still out of my mind. The road seemed impassible; an intricate, finely calibrated, mechanical organism comprised of cars, bicycles, motorbikes, and Tuk Tuks with its own horrifying and inexorable logic. I couldn’t see how to fit into the construct. I thought about the expanse of my life, about my conviction that every moment of it until that point had been a rehearsal, a prelude to my real life, which hadn’t started yet. The road divested me of this idea. I saw that a gearwheel in my being had slipped. The time-chips had been cashed and spent. They were irretrievable. The world had turned without me. A knot of pure panic formed in my stomach. Baby heart. Beat.
Then a shocking quiet. The metal and macadam apparatus before me grew still. Empty. A nothing. No thing. But something. Some. Thing. Lapsed. A break in time. Baby. From a great height I saw myself crawling. Crawliiiiiiiiiiiing. Across the oil and tar sea. Like an insect. Beep. With the turning tide I reached the other shore. And there I sat for what seemed like a very very long time. Looooooong. Time. I can feel.
Like fucking Indiana Jones. On zoots. Now I only had to make it inside the Temple of Doom wherein my bed lay. From somewhere I found the conviction to stand up and walk into the lobby of the hotel. I hurried through the metal detector. Beep beep. Security stared at me. I took everything out of my pockets. Beep beep. I took my watch off. Beep beep. I took my rings and chain off. Beep beep. Fuck. The guard beckoned me. He patted down my arms and legs and wrists and calves. He cupped my testicles. I walked through again. Beep beep beep beep. An eternal beep beep. The guards’s eyes burrowing into me. Beep beep. I was made out of suspicious. It was as if the charas had induced a hellish reverse alchemical process by which one of my organs had been transformed into base metal. Beep. Jail time loomed. I imagined doing bird in a small cell. Just bars and a perch. Baby, I can feel your heart beat. The guard took one last look at me before waving me through.
A few minutes later I was back in my room.
I needed a lie down.
Fuck. Dankiest zoot of all time.
OH god i laughed. brillllllll