An edited version of the article was published in Yahoo! Originals on April 17, 2014.
Read the article here.
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| Irfan Akhtar (name changed), an 18-year-old charas addict since last three years, outside the de-addiction facility at Police Control Room, Srinagar. |
SRINAGAR
On
the way to his chambers, a pharmacist notices this bonhomie and halts in his
tracks. By now, Fareed is humming again, his frail voice carrying mellow tunes
to us standing at the end of the corridor. Haji Abdur Khan, the pharmacist,
seems quite taken by this.
“Bring
him in,” he orders. His patients are more than happy to do his bidding.
A
minute later, we are in Khan’s sanctum, a dimly lit space partitioned by a
thick black curtain from 11 beds lying close to each other outside. The glow
from the bulbs glistens over Wani’s head as he looks at us wide-eyed, clearly
agog at the sudden attention he has been commanding. The doctor launches
himself in a flurry of Kashmiri. I manage to catch the words ‘camera’ and ‘record’.
His last sentence comprises of one word. Going by the eager eyes and mobile phone
cameras that train themselves on the performer-in-waiting, I guess what Khan
said: Begin.
It’s
a chilly April afternoon, the cold contributed in no small measure by the
relentless spate of unseasonal rains since the fag-end of the previous month.
The drone of jeeps and mini-trucks goes on outside the room. Armed men wearing
protective gear and carrying assault rifles are making their way to man the
streets of Srinagar. Oblivious and acclimatized to it all, more residents start
crowding into the pharmacy room, eager to get a glimpse of the mehfil within.
“Jo
phool maine aankh se dekha toh, aansu to bas nikal gaya;
Mere
phool mein aise patte na the dekha maine, ye phool to kaisa...”
Fifteen
minutes, five recordings from three phones and some delicious ditties in both
Hindi and Kashmiri later, the doctor catches hold of Irfan Akhtar’s back. “You’re
up tomorrow,” he says. Akhtar, yet another inmate, has been giggling all
through the performance, much entertained at Wani’s expense. Now that he is caught
in the line of fire, he can manage little defiance and smiles meekly.
Six days before he would treat a motley group of drug addicts to a spontaneous performance, Fareed Wani was a serial alcoholic who also abused cannabis and codeine (through cough syrups). His partner-in-crime Ahmad Ali has been seeking treatment for his charas addiction for the last 20 days. 18-year-old Irfan Akhtar was another charas addict for the past three years. They constitute a few of the inmates in one of the only four in-house de-addiction facilities in the entire Kashmir region, a valley that has seen an alarming rise in substance abuse ever since the outbreak of the insurgency. Where I stood on that particular Saturday, but for this welcome relief, it was business as clockwork at the Jammu & Kashmir Police De-addiction Centre.
***
Few
surveys have been conducted to assess the exact magnitude of the drug addiction
in the valley. The two often cited by the doctors date back to 2008, the same
year that J&K Police in Srinagar started the first ever de-addiction centre
in Kashmir. In a study conducted by United Nations Drug Control Programme, it
was found that there are about 70,000 substance abusers in the valley. The
number peaks at 3.86 lakh cannabis, opioid and alcohol abusers in the book
published by Dr. Mushtaq Margoob, a reputed psychiatrist from the summer
capital. While the dialogue on the extent of the problem has come to fore over
the subsequent years, efforts tackle it haven’t grown in proportion.
At
the time Dr. Muzafar Khan – now the director of the centre that has spread its
wings to two more districts – launched the treatment facility at Police Control
Room in Srinagar, the masses were far from receptive. “There were huge
apprehensions. First was, it is a police centre. Police-public relationship had
a huge gap in it. Secondly, we got huge criticism from policy-makers,
politicians and bureaucrats. [They said] there is no drug abuse in Kashmir.
They criticised us for exaggerating the problem [adding] that maybe there were
some hidden motives.”
But
public outrage notwithstanding, it turned out that medical intervention was the
need of the hour. Those wishing to get over their addiction trooped in from all
over Kashmir, most of them men between 15-30 years of age. Medicinal opioid and
different forms of cannabis like charas, hashish, bhaang were
found to be troubling most, although alcohol consumption, labelled haraam by
the Muslim majority of the region, also showed an upward graph.
“In
various acts of violence, be it stone-pelting or otherwise, we found that those
involved in it were doing drugs. Being a conflict zone, there was a need of a
de addiction centre,” says S M Sahai, then Inspector General of Police,
Kashmir, and the brain behind the initiative. But the common sentiment was that
men in uniform to be at the root of their problem. Cynics painted it as a way
to gain favour among the masses.
Sahai,
however, dismisses these theories: “That was not our intention but it was the
outcome.”
Ever since its inception, the facility has overseen more than 1,100 patients get a new lease of life, only 22% of which have relapsed. Says Dr. Muzafar, “If I see this rate with the world scenario, it’s a very healthy sign. When you see the world literature, the relapse rate is 60-70%.”
Being
a police centre guarantees that there won’t be a case of a runaway patient. At
the same time, it makes those in the gray of law averse to seeking treatment,
defeating the purpose it was formed to serve – rehabilitation of stone-pelters
and the like.
“Many
are reluctant to come here as they don’t want to get noticed,” says Haris
Abrar, a social worker working at the facility. “If this centre would have been
out of these premises, I think per day there would have been 20-25 more drug
addicts who would be visiting here for treatment.”
***
“We
call them ‘players’,” chuckled a trainee police constable who had happened to
drop in the centre. As we spoke, he spotted Manpreet Singh, a 32-year-old who
had spent the past 16 days in the facility. “Le, fukki kha (Here, eat
some fukki),” he called out in a mock-serious voice.
Singh
was sitting in the compound that doubles up as a parking lot and a junkyard,
bathing in the first rays of sunshine that marked the onset of summer. His
reaction was instant: “Bhagwan bachae (God help me).” He turned to me
and smiled, “Ghar pe last warning mili hai (My folks have given
me the last warning).”
The
son of a retired BSF officer and a headmistress of a school in Baramulla
district, 32-year-old Singh was never quite the studious type. After giving his
matriculation exams a miss, he decided his calling lay behind the wheel. His
gateway into the world of haze was at a textbook Punjabi wedding extravaganza.
As they sat outside the mandap, an acquaintance passed around tobacco to
a bunch of willing teenagers. Out of curiosity that assails a 19-year-old,
Singh took a few pinches. Soon, his head was spinning like a ballerina and
within months, an occasional pinch turned into a regular fix. It wasn’t long before
he would move on to painkillers like Spasmoproxyvon, referred to as ‘tota’
or parrot for its colour, before being tempted by the psychotropic fukki,
a cocktail of drugs like cannabis and opium.
The
nature of his job had just as much a role to play. “80 out of 100 drivers take
some kind of drugs or alcohol. When you drive up to 24 hours at a stretch, your
body starts protesting. But once you consume fukki, your mind goes to
sleep even as the eyes remain open. I was now a tiger, ready to drive for up to
36 hours at a time,” says Singh.
It
took his family nearly four years to notice that there was something odd about
Singh. By this time, it had visibly started taking toll on his health. Already
short and lanky, Singh was shrivelled up but still in denial. Unlike many
others who beg, borrow and steal from their family to feed their addiction,
Singh was earning money for himself and conveniently spent a large part of his
time out of his house, away from their admonitions.
It was during one of his trips to Uttar Pradesh that he met a fellow truck driver who would change how Singh perceived his habit. Singh remembers getting into the co-passenger’s seat along with him, asking if the driver had some food to eat. “There is a small compartment above the windscreen where we usually keep travel essentials,” he tells me. “This man took out a small circular bamboo basket from up there. I thought we were going to share rotis.”
As
the driver opened the basket, a long, scaly creature uncoiled itself and raised
its hood into the daylight. Its master rolled out his tongue and the creature,
obviously used to the drill, stung him on the tip. As the driver threw his head
back, lolling at the high, Singh shrunk back in terror, threw the door open and
fled the vehicle.
“I
had seen a person getting off on snake-bites. If I hadn’t stopped then, there
was no telling what I would be doing in a few years,” he says. But he knew had
steeped too deep into his addiction and there would be no recovery in sight if
there wasn’t professional help. After first week of going turkey, Singh now
declines when offered the daily quota of cigarettes, a standard practice to
keep withdrawal symptoms at bay. He doesn’t want anything to mar the
determination to quit every kind of intoxicant or to let his mother down who, a
few hundred miles away, is praying at the Golden Temple for her son’s health.
Although several of the inmates have hair-raising anecdotes to share, they prefer not discussing it among themselves. With their daily schedules carved around individual and group counselling sessions, not to mention the weekly meeting with parents of patients on the waiting list, they are inclined not to reopen the bleak chapters of their past unless necessary. When they do, others treat is in a matter-of-fact way. I got a glimpse of this poker-face when I sat admiring a sketch Faizal, the newest entrant to the centre, was making.
“He
learnt to do this in the jail,” a resident patient said over my shoulder.
I looked at Faizal who continued to outline the tips of a wildflower with a black marker. “Why were you imprisoned?”
“There was a visitor to our house, someone I hadn’t seen earlier, and he was insulting my father. I picked up a rock and threw at him. He died,” said Faizal, now moving on to the tendrils.
You
could notice all wildflowers on his canvas were dyed in the same hues.
***
Every
one-on-one counselling session is interspersed with stock questions about
health and willingness to reform along with instructions on how to go about it.
Some, like Singh, consider them a daily catharsis while others like 19-year-old
Shoaib Khan often don’t go beyond monosyllables. Youngest of the lot, Shoaib
has been promised by the counsellors that the day he leaves the centre, he will
be carrying a mouse in his hand. It is their way of saying he will get over his
paralyzing fear of rodents.
For the last three years, Shoaib’s poison was hashish. While clean for last 26 days, it wouldn’t be the first time he has been trying to quit. In 2012, after he was thrashed by his father for doing drugs, Shoaib had tried letting go but couldn’t make it beyond 10 days. He relapsed and dived back in the deep end of the clouds with renewed vengeance.
But
it wasn’t only the withdrawal symptoms that were getting too difficult to bear.
As his addiction worsened, so did its dependence on music; in particular, the
works of hip-hop artists like Honey Singh, Bohemia, Eminem and Lil Wayne. Their
songs became more than the sum of their beats. Shoaib started modelling himself
after what he believed was the “Fuck love, do drugs” culture promoted in their
music.
He
quotes from a song ‘Remind Me’ by Bohemia, a Punjabi rapper from Pakistan: “A
line goes, ‘Haan main sharabi par teray pichay chad haan sharab, bhung oohda
koi nahi ilaj’ (Yes, I am a drunkard but I will give it up for you; but
there is no cure for bhaang). I liked that attitude.” By now, he was
spending more than `2,000 a week, selling his electronics and stealing from his
brother to keep up with the costs.
One
day, he was roaming in the outskirts of Srinagar on the bypass road along with
three of his friends, looking to get high in the symphony of nature. From a
spot, behind a dense clump of chinar trees, they saw smoke rising in the air.
They followed the trail to a bonfire around which sat four local bus drivers.
One of them was rolling a hash cigarette.
“Not
only did they show us how to make hash, they also shared some of the stuff they
had made,” says Shoaib. “We were ecstatic that day.” They could now harvest
their own hash, fresh from the fields.
The
topography of the valley is such that cannabis grows in the wild at several
places, concentrated most in the southern districts of Anantnag and Budgaum.
Over time, the farmers realized the cash-crop they had at hand. According to a
report in local news daily, there have been instances wherein schools have been
found deserted in peak season as children were helping their parents in
cannabis cultivation.
With his newfound skills, Shoaib’s drug consumption augmented. But over the course of time, he was disgusted with his dependence. Quit he must, he realized, but having once burnt his fingers by waging a lone battle, Shoaib decided to place himself in better hands. “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” he tells me, the tautology indicating his B.A. aspirations with a specialization in Psychology.
***
If
one is to compare the drug abuse in Kashmir with that with the rest of India,
the statistics won’t vary much, say psychiatrists. However, an accurate
consequence of wading through barbed wires for more than two decades can be
found if one compares the abuse today with that before the armed insurgency. In
2002, doctors at Government Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, on studying the drug
trends through the 1980s and 2002, found that the use of opioid-based
preparations had increased from 9.5% to 73.61%. Those using multiple substances
were found to have increased from 15.8% to 41.6%.
None
of those I spoke to at the centre had suffered directly from the armed conflict.
Their initiation was due to issues that can be seen in any tier I or tier II
cities, from relationship and domestic troubles to peer influence or a sense of
adventure. But experts say that in absence of means of recreation, Kashmiris
take to stimulants to seek relief. Two of the most quoted examples are the
virtual non-existence of cinema halls in the entire region and the deserted,
under-siege look that the valley dons after dusk.
“We all live in a zone where there is no stability,” says Dr. Arif Maghribi, a psychiatrist with the Srinagar-based Mariam Wellness Centre, a voluntary organization providing mental healthcare facilities. “This results into the destruction of threshold frequency, tolerance levels and coping mechanism even if one hasn’t directly seen or experienced violence. [A person from Kashmir] will get into drugs more easily than a boy from Mumbai or Bengaluru.”
But
what happens when those saddled with responsibility of the masses themselves
start doling out addictives? On the condition of anonymity, a doctor told me,
“Alcohol in Kashmir used to be at an all-time low before militancy. It
continued even during the days militancy was at its peak. Then all of a sudden,
it started increasing.
“You hardly have licensed bars here. You have a few in Srinagar and Sonawari. But what about people getting alcohol in Bandipore or the remotest of villages?” the doctor takes a pause before answering the questions he posed: “Army.”
This
brings us to the tale of Imtiaz Ahman Ghojri, an alcoholic and opioid-addict
from Baramulla and, by his own claims, a former informer of the Indian Army. A
fruit seller born in a family of cattle-herders, Ghojri lived right opposite
what used to be a mansion belonging to Kashmiri Pandits. Over the years, as the
original inhabitants fled, the army took their place, converting the house into
their camp. Ghojri was a familiar sight to the officials of Rashtriya Rifles
and soon, developed a rapport with a Major of the company.
With
a staple intake of one bottle a day, Ghojri would be only a daily down-payment
of `250 to the
quartermaster away from a bottle of whiskey, the labels of which would be torn
off. The difficult part was to sneak it out of the army camp discreetly. His
solution used to put the bottle in the front of his pants and walk out. “I
couldn’t be seen. The locals knew I was a Muslim and would have beaten me up,”
he says.
The
night a few militants entered his house in the wee hours of night, it would
turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Ghojri, who was the brother of a stone-pelter
killed in a skirmish with the police, also had notoriety among the locals,
probably the kind militants are on a lookout for.
“They
gave me a grenade and said it had to be thrown at the main chowk at two
o’clock [the next day]. In return, they said they will give me `5,000,” said Ghojri.
But as they left, news floated in that the men were killed in an encounter.
Having developed cold feet, Ghojri lost no time in dialling the Major and
telling him the exact sequence of events. The officer was apparently pleased at
the honesty and asked him to join his network of informers. He would be given a
monthly stipend of `4,000. That, “And alcohol for free! Whenever I wanted, how
much ever I wanted – three bottles, four bottles. I had now become their man.”
The
arrangement continued for a few months before the major was transferred and a
new one took his place. It was around this time that the locals found a notice
stuck on the walls of a mosque bearing the names of some alleged informers of
the army. Though his name didn’t figure in the list, once again, Ghojri
realized the dangers of not sitting on the fence. Ever since, he cut off ties
with the army and paid middlemen twice the price. It seemed like a better
option than his head on a steak.
If
Ghojri is at the de-addiction centre today, the credit goes to his mother and
the cousin he will be marrying in a few months. “Sridevi is nothing compared to
her,” he says earnestly. “I don't love alcohol as
much as I would my wife.”
***
Day
25: The last of his detention. In the past few days, the skies have cleared up
and the grounds are lush with sunshine. Ahmad Ali had packed his bags hours
before his folks were due to arrive. On a good day, it takes an hour to reach
Srinagar from Sopore, his hometown. On a day the car tyre gets punctured en
route, it takes much longer than one can bear.
“I
never thought of it as a de-addiction centre,” he says, trying his best not to
look restless. “It was like a school where you get some training.”
While
the disciplined life might have purged him over the last three and a half
weeks, Ali still can’t see himself through the day without a few cigarettes. He
has no qualms about the fragile state he is in. “I only hope there is no
trouble at home. Otherwise, there is a 100 percent chance I will relapse.” The
anti-addiction medicines can do only so much. The rest is one man against a
world of temptations.
He hugs everyone as he leaves. They crowd around the door and watch him walk out of the gate following his father’s lead, not once looking back. One day, they will all be walking out burying their baggage, hoping to start afresh. Till then, Ali’s last words in the morning group counselling would hang in the air.
“...matlab,”
he had said, summing it up, “be like a human.”
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