On one of those melancholy nights when sleep doesn’t find its way to my eyes and I have to find something for my mind to occupy with,
(because just sitting and thinking and not doing anything is such low-key and who even does that anyway?), I stumbled upon Yeh Mera Deewanapan Hai’– a song I used to listen a lot many moons ago. What followed afterwards was perfectly summed up by Arundhati Roy in her book ‘The God of Small Things’. She wrote “Smells, like music, holds memories” and indeed they do.
Susheela Raman’s stimulating voice held my hand like the #FollowMeTo girl and took me back to the cities of my old life, where the epitaphs of my memories were carved with shining colors, where better dreams were dreamt and innocence was still ripe. I was lifted up by the neurological clouds and was taken to a happy place, away from the torment and grief of this world and before I knew, I was floating through the corridors of reminiscence, sporadically letting out tumultuous laughs followed by long, deep silences.
Coming back to my senses, the lyrics aptly captured my questioning of this bizarre incident. As the smoke of my thoughts dissolved, I wondered Yeh Mera Deewanapan hai? Ya Mohabbat ka suroor hai? Is it my (own) madness(which caused this)? or Is this the pleasure of my love (for my past)?
The whole experience felt like a detachment from reality. Like a distant dream. Like a delusion.
Like a Drug.
This has led me to change my approach towards people who sell me the pleasure of using drugs. In the past, I have upset them with my savage opinion – that usage of drugs is a pathetic self-declaration and a cowardly expression of one’s own unhappiness and the inability to cope with the current condition, but moving forward, though no change in my opinion, I am going to dilute down my response and politely offer them to dig up a song or a smell from the past and rejoice in the sinless drug of memory.
Some might laugh it off and continue to offer me to get ‘high’ which I’d have to continue to respectfully decline, politely reminding them that I have never used any intoxicants before and I intend to keep it that way for all of my future.
Or I might as well be just as savage as Salvador Dali and say..
“I Don’t Do Drugs. I am Drugs”
*Dab*
