The Coming of Darkness
Drugs came very easily to me – it was almost as though we were fated to meet. I cannot and will not blame my descent into addiction on ‘Bad company’ or uninformed experimentation. I was (and continue to be) an avid reader of fiction, and had a fairly good idea of what both baseline drugs like marijuana, alcohol and tobacco as well as the more hardcore substances were. I knew exactly what I was getting into, and got into it with my eyes wide open. It took me little time to find other young people who were sick of being ‘Good boys’ and who exercised the option of drugs in the sleepy little home town. I finally belonged to a group. No matter what the rest of the world thought of them – and me – we thought and felt alike. I grew my hair long, learned all the choicest slang and terms of abuse, stepped up my search for newer and more exotic drugs, and withdrew my candidature from the losing game called Life.

I won’t dwell on the finer points of my addiction’s progression – there are none. It was a headlong rush into the depths, and I went willingly and even joyfully. My family soon discovered what I was into, and I soon discovered a dark secret – as long as I was on drugs, nobody bothered me. My parents were totally flabbergasted about this unexpected turn of events, and quite clueless on how to remedy the situation. The authorities at Military School, of course, took a different viewpoint.

As soon as my regular use of drugs became known to them, I was threatened with expulsion. Since this was exactly what I was hoping for, the threat didn’t stop me. I even smuggled drugs into the school to hand out to certain like–minded students. Sure enough, I was eventually kicked out.

I want to ask a question here
If drugs could get my control–hungry, overbearing disciplinarian father as well as the cross of a school I detested off my back… if they could help me finally belong to a group of people who did not judge me by skin color, nationality or religion… if they could give me an excuse to drop out of this miserable rat race of superficial achievement and obedience to shallow, mediocre people…

Where was my sin?

No Solutions
At some point, my father realized that this was a problem that wouldn’t go away on its own. This wasn’t a phase that I would grow out of – it would eventually kill me. The prospect held no terrors to my mind. I figured that when I did finally go, I would probably not even be aware of it.

I have give my father full credit here – he tried everything. Everything that money, influence and his version of fatherly concern could achieve, he tried. And he does love me; I know that beyond a shadow of doubt. However, his efforts to rescue me from myself were fruitless for two basic reasons. One, I did not want to be rescued. Two, my addiction gave him a sense of personal failure, so he thought that the solution should somehow lie with him. As it turned out, it lay neither with him or me.

I give him credit because he brought the full weight of his resources to bear on trying to pull me out of addiction. There were no drug rehabilitation centers in that part of India at that time (1984 or ’85, if I recall correctly) and the only option was psychiatric treatment. I was duly incarcerated in a private mental hospital in –––––––––. For four months, I was totally resigned to the imagined prospect of spending the rest of my life in a nuthouse. For the duration, illicit drugs stopped and were replaced by legal mind–benders like anti–psychotics and antidepressants. Eventually, my parents discharged me. I resumed using drugs from the very next day.

Looking back, what followed was rather interesting and certainly entertaining for me. I did not have the slightest desire to stop using drugs, and defying my father and the rest of the world had never been so easy. I do not recall the exact number of treatment centers I was admitted to – to give a rough idea, I had 27 admissions in one of them, and a minimum of five in most of the others. I spent long stretches of time in between admission either under psychotherapy or in obscure Hindu ashrams.

It was my family’s favorite Hindu swami who first told me that the existence of sin and the need to combat it is not a medical, psychiatric or sociologic, but a spiritual problem. He had accurately identified the crux of the addiction problem. However, he had no solution.