He was a nice guy but I had to kill him
February 10, 2016, India
I was reading an article on medium the other day about alcoholism written from the perspective of a University student. I was struck by the parallels with my world, though I live on the opposite side of the planet. Alcoholism is just as rampant in India, and I am still mystified by the whole thing.
What makes a person an alcoholic? Why didn’t I become one? Does it require a certain kind of personality to become an addict? Is it in the genes? My brother and I are alike in many ways but how come he loves the stuff while I can’t stand it? Is there something wrong with me or am I just lucky?
I don’t have any answers so I decided to tell the story of my acquaintance with Al K Hall, and how our relationship never progressed beyond that.
In India, as everywhere else in the world, alcohol is the great social lubricant. My home state has one of the highest rates of alcoholism as well as literacy, and I’ve a suspicion the two are linked. Artists and writers consider the number of drinks that they can hold down, without getting sloshed, as a degree of their artistic greatness. That builds up peer pressure for the would be arty types as they try to keep up with glass count. They end up making complete fools of themselves to the vast entertainment of their role models, which I think was the game plan in the first place.
Anyway, my first brush with alcohol was when I entered University. Like all the other kids, I wanted to try this stuff that the adults seemed to absolutely adore. The good thing was most of us students couldn’t afford it, which was also a bad thing as that meant we had to settle for illegal hooch. What goes into hooch is known only to its maker, and there have been instances of industrial methyl alcohol being used, with tragic results.
Anyway, the excuse to drink finally came with the end of the first semester exams. My friends and I felt we deserved a reward for all those hours of slogging. We pooled in all funds but there wasn’t much. So we had to come up with innovative ways to get enough stuff to satisfy the raging thirst of our bunch of alcohol-deprived young adults.
One of my friends knew someone in the army who got him a discounted bottle of rum from the army canteen. Another bummed a bottle off the lady running the local restaurant. She ran a profitable moonshine side-business, distilling country stuff in her kitchen. A third ‘borrowed’ half a bottle of the finest Scotch from his rich uncle’s cupboard, refilling the original bottle with water. The old gentleman was too drunk most evenings to tell the difference. As for our resident daredevil, he stole into a nearby farm, skimmed up a 25m coconut tree and emptied the toddy tapper’s collection for the day.
Later that evening, we pooled our spoils and surveyed the collection of various bottles. Sadly, it was just about enough for two to three glasses for each of us. By now, everyone was clamouring for a taste. I nominated myself as the barman, and dutifully siphoned out small sips of the precious stuff. The truth was I had a sensitive nose, and was quite horrified by the awful smell of most of the stuff. So I was really reluctant to even taste it.
Soon the strong liquor had begun to go the head of my mates and loosen their tongues. A full scale singing competition was organised, with each person having to sing a song starting with last syllable of the previous singers’ song. If you couldn’t come up with a song, you had to ‘bottoms up’ a glass of your choice. As luck would have it, my turn came up early and as I can’t sing for nuts, I had to down a glass of some repulsive smelling stuff.
An hour later, I was feeling pretty aggrieved as the drink had done nothing for me. Why were people making such a big deal of drinking? I recalled vaguely hearing from my seniors at University that mixing your drinks made them more potent. So I put up a motion for it, and was given a vociferous go-ahead by my tipsy pals.
A bucket was called into service, and all the bottles were emptied into it. I vigorously stirred the concoction which we called Crazy Mary. There was just enough for one last round for all, and I ladled out the stuff. Finally there was just one glass left, and I did another ‘bottoms up’ hoping to get a kick.
Ten minutes passed, and the drink had still not gone to my head. I decided to help it along. Literally. I went up to a wall, and did a handstand, and held my position for five minutes. When I came back down to earth, I found it hard to stand steady on my feet, and kept swaying from side as I walked along the corridors of the student’s hostel.
But overall, I felt relaxed and friendly towards the whole world. The realisation slowly dawned on me that I was drunk, and it felt good. I was really pleased to finally crack the puzzle of why people love to drink.
That was the last thing I remember of that night. It would have been nice if I had passed out, but it seemed I didn’t. All I know of the rest of the episode is from what my friends told me about it.
It seems I claimed to be feeling high, and had a desire to go higher. To do this, I was going to the main University building in the campus, which was a kilometer away. After this somewhat mystifying statement, I took off running, and disappeared into the night in the direction of the University.
My worried mates ran after me, but I was a good runner and they couldn’t keep up. But they knew where I was going, and followed me there. As it was past midnight, the building was empty, and my friends wandered the deserted corridors calling out my name.
After a while, they heard a distant voice singing tunelessly about ‘Body Centered Cubic Crystals.’ Since this was part of the subject of the last exam, the budding detectives figured out that it was me, and followed the sound of my voice till they reached the terrace of the 4-storey building. There was a 20 foot flagpole on top of the building, and I was perched atop it, singing my heart out. I’m scared of heights so I’ve no idea how I got up there.
My worried friends begged me to come down as there was a clean drop right over the edge of the building. But I had no ears for anything but my tuneless theme song of crystals. The anxious group finally lay down around the flagpole waiting for me to come down, and eventually drifted off into a drunken stupor.
I came to my senses at dawn the next morning, to find myself lying on the terrace of the University tower with my friends all asleep around the place. My brain wasn’t working too well, and I recall being puzzled as to why we were sleeping there. My head was spinning, and I knew just one thing, and that was I wanted to be back in my bed. So I staggered off to my room without informing my sleeping comrades.
The sleeping sleuths awoke after a while to find their mark had again pulled a disappearing trick on them. They looked around for a body but couldn’t find one, and eventually trooped back to the hostel to find me safe in bed, tried to wake me without success, and decided to go to sleep themselves.
I next awoke around midday, was terribly sick and threw up many times. Had the hoochstress used methyl alcohol instead of ethyl alcohol? The way my head felt, it seemed possible, so I wrote a short note of apology to my parents. In short, I had the first hangover of my life, and it wasn’t the last.
But after several more binges, I began to feel this wasn’t for me. It was unnerving to know a second personality lived within my body, who emerged during my drunken episodes to do things that I was incapable of in real life. I mean forget flagpoles, I couldn’t even look down from the top of a tall building without feeling dizzy. So what else could I do in my alter ego state? Dr Jekyll was beginning to get a bit worried about Mr Hyde’s antics!
In any case, the taste of the stuff had not grown on me as my friends had promised it would. In fact, I had begun to detest its taste even more, and would try to drown it somehow, like for instance, oodles of orange soda in a vodka. Finally, I had enough and stopped drinking just like that.
A couple of years passed by, and I was in my last year in University. There was a University Youth Festival happening, and the booze was flowing. My friends were offended that I refused to join in and be part of the group so we got into a debate about drinking.
Peer pressure had come to do battle.
I said drinking does nothing for me. They claimed it would help me let go off my inhibitions. I requested that I be enlightened as to what inhibition of mine alcohol would remove. They asked me if I could go onstage in my undies without a drink, in front of the audience half of whom were girls.
I had a point to prove, and took up the challenge. There was Fancy Dress competition coming up, and I decided to compete as a half naked beggar. My tipsy friends were thrilled. They started painting realistic wounds onto my body with red paint, and tearing up a pieces of cloth and rubbing it in the dirt to get that authentic beggar look.
They got so carried away with their art that we missed the entry deadline for the competition, and were not able to take part. But after undergoing two hours of having body painting, I wasn’t going to give up so easy. There was a Group Dance competition for which the entries were still open. So I got my name registered. Now all I needed was a troupe and a dance.
Fortunately, one of our group, was a good dancer with some fancy moves. But competing against teams with well-rehearsed dances, was going to be difficult. We needed an edge, and came up with an idea of having a theme. We decided to tackle leprosy. Poor people with this disease usually become outcasts in Indian society. They are in a pitiable plight with parts of their body and face falling off, which is really sad as it’s actually a curable disease.
This social cause helped us rope in a few more friends for the dance, and our dancing expert choreographed it. Basically, it would start off with me crawling onstage with my tormented body all twisted out of shape, courtesy my yoga skills. I’m dressed in my torn, dirty rags, bleeding all over with raw ugly wounds, and holding up a begging bowl, as I cry out for alms.
A slow chant then comes on and the whole troupe makes an entrance and dance in a circle around me, as if they are praying. Finally, they all would kneel down and touch their foreheads to the ground facing me where I sit in the centre of the circle. The music goes off, and I unwind myself, rise up from the floor, stalk to the front of the stage, and pronounce, ‘Leprosy is Curable.’ Peppy music breaks out and the now joyful troupe, go mad dancing around me while the dancing champ does some freaky moves. It ends with my doing a full split in the centre and the curtains coming down.
The audience went crazy and applauded like mad. So though our dancing skills were minimal, the overall effect was enough to win us the Second Prize in the Group Dancing competition. Sadly, my two left feet ensured that this promising beginning was also the end of my fledgling dance career.
As for peer pressure to drink, it lost all its fizz as far as I was concerned, and I got through the rest of University days without ever having to taste another drop of the horrid stuff.
When I began working, the pressures of social drinking returned. Where dance had once rescued me, my acting skills now saved the day. I could act as drunk as the drunkest drunk, having actually been that. So I got into the habit of ordering clear drinks, pouring it into the nearest potted plants, topping up my empty glass with water, and then stumbling around, speaking in slurred tones, and belting out tuneless songs. No one has ever caught on.
These days, when I hear about peer pressure to drink, I think the pressure is all in your head. If alcohol can give us the courage to do something, we can just as well do it without alcohol if we set our minds to it.
Addiction is a bit more of puzzle. If a drink, drug or food makes you feel good or less bad, you will want more of it. Like I did get stuck once on a painkiller, paracetamol, for a chronic headache. But again, it’s all in the head. Once I figured out that paracetamol was not harmless, I found a yoga based cure for the headaches. Pain gone, addiction gone.
I guess I got lucky because I have always detested the vile taste of alcohol. So to me, all the high it can give isn’t worth the disgust and discomfort of having to push it down my gagging throat.
Maybe that’s why I wrote this long post. If someone reads about my weird escape from the peer pressure to drink, and is inspired to come up with their own way to avoid being ensnared by alcohol, it’ll have been worth my while.
Anyway, that’s the story of how my Dr Jekyl killed Mr Hyde.
