Time Out

I met him at Seelampur, a crowded and almost abandoned backyard of East Delhi, which itself is a crowded and abandoned backyard of the capital city. He said he would take me to young children who were consuming smack as it was freely available. Munna was a known quot;smackiyaquot; as addicts are known there in Seelampur.

As we walked together to the car, he began to tell me his story. He said that he had been in all the well-known de-addiction centres in town and that he could not continue there as they were not prepared to treat him with amodicum of dignity.

He was a mere 28 years old, and not older as I had thought. He said that he had taken to drugs eight years ago. I asked him how much money he spent each day on smack. His entire earnings from the rickshaw, which are around Rs 150 per day, he reckoned. But what did he do for food then? 8220;Smack kills hunger. You never feel hungry if you are on smack,8221; he shrugged. That made me to look at smack in a new light. Maybe it is the medicine for poverty. If there is no bread, just give them smack, I could easily imagine the powers that be deciding.

Wasn8217;t he married? 8220;Yes. But my wife is no more with me,8221; he said. And he told me a story that effected the most sudden of transformations. He was not what he had been just moments before. Why did your wife go away? Was it because of drugs? No, she wanted me to stay with her parents as she did not find my earnings sufficient, he replied. 8220;I wanted to live in my own little house with her. I had never had a family, and so I wanted a home. My moneywas not enough for her. She even used to suspect me of taking drugs when I had not even touched them until she left me,8221; he recounted.

I did not know what to say. The first thing that occurred to me was to ask him why he got so desperate to embark on a certain path to self-destruction through drugs. Couldn8217;t he have married another person? However, I stopped myself from asking such a question because there are no simple answers to such a query.

But why drugs? Won8217;t they kill you? I could not ask him that either. Why not, I was asking myself. Why would he want to be alive? What has he to live for? He probably cannot find anything that can make him want to live or face the tantrums of life afresh. Why not buffer himself with smack? Why not simply die?

I wanted to tell him that there were other ways to buffer oneself than through drugs. He could join hands with other smack addicts of Seelampur and start a de-addiction centre where addicts were treated with dignity. So what if we cannot banish the drugtraffickers? We can at least forge a force to help those who want to free themselves from drugs and live again. Maybe he could show other addicts that there are some goals worth living for. Even those with broken souls.

In fact, this world and its misery, which is enough reason to run away from it, are also enough reason to live, I wanted to tell Munna. For as long as there are unhappy people who need help, there is a purpose to our existence. But I never told him that. We never formed that de-addiction centre of our dreams at Seelampur. So there is reason enough to live on.