The Never-Ending Story

It's hard to talk about substance abuse without either sounding sanctimonious or drowning in a morass of self-pity. It's particularly hard talking about substance abuse being a woman in a fiercely patriarchal society where women are kept on a much tighter leash than men are. A man can spend his formative years 'running with the pack' and then go on to being a respected, respectable member of society. If you're a woman, they brand you, they brand you where it shows, and once the word is out a lifetime of 'good behavior' will not erase the marks of censure on your forehead.

So here I am, at the ripe old age of 24, living a double life with the demons of my past forever threatening the specters of my future. I have a good job, a stable home life, a loving boyfriend willing to take me for what I am, baggage and all. But every once in a while the need creeps up on me again, a little voice whispers in my ears.how much easier it would be if I could just…
My stock phrase in school and then in the initial months of college, when faced with a joint or a bong or a pipe being passed around was 'I don't need artificial stimulation to get me high'. I'd repeat it again and again as if it were a particularly vengeful taveez, scrutinizing my psyche for the slightest hint of weakness. School years were easy in terms of abstinence from drugs, I was already making the 'I'm just a little bit cooler than you' statement with the baby bottles of absolut I would sneak in in my bag and then mix with my 7-up during break. In hindsight I don't even know where that habit started, nobody in my immediate family drank. In fact my parents took the concept of 'conservative' to its highest degree and then nailed it to the ceiling with a pneumatic drill in case one of us had missed the point. Pop psyche has since told me that it is the children of the most anally disciplined parents who tend to rebel, I don't know If that's true or not. Perhaps, but then perhaps, as my mother says, some kids are put on earth only to torment their parents. Ready made devil spawn if you like, just add water.

College was a different story altogether. As I made my way through the gates at the airport, heading for a place I had never seen where no one would know who I was, no one would know anything about me, my thoughts were on the infinite possibilities for reinvention the coming years afforded. I could be anything I wanted ... my emotional baggage was deposited at the check-in counter.

So I thought, it is only now, as I sit here 5 years later and finally spew all the dirt that has accumulated within me do I realize how that baggage does not contain the offload option. Every intangible kg has been with me and will be with me till the day I die, or worse, have a frontal lobotomy. It's easier to carry now that I've admitted it exists.

I wont bore you with the exact details of my 'escapades', the what where how when with whom, but do join me in my search for why if you like.

My parents tell me I was a lovely baby that grew into a changeling, alternating between aggressive and clingy. The only thing that distinguished me from the millions of other panting lumps of lard was the fact that I never cried. I had a peculiar tolerance for physical pain. This lessened as I grew older, and by the time I was twelve I would bawl with the rest of them come injection time. "It was for the ice cream I know' said my father when I reminded him of this a while ago.

College was a revelation in more ways than one. I had no past, no fingers pointed when I walked by, no bitchy women whispered 'you know she's done so and so' when I passed. I made friends quickly and easily, I was bright, intelligent, amusing, Asian ... perhaps more Asian than I had been at home even. One of the first friends I made was a guy in the men's hall downstairs who had a room to himself that we all (we all who knew nobody but each other) congregated in after dinner to make our stilted pre-security conversation of where from and where to. We moved in a herd across campus, as days went by we often clutched at each other for support. In a throwback to school days I was the only girl in the group. I had never been comfortable around women, now I wonder if perhaps other women have never been comfortable around me and I just picked up on that and acted accordingly.

It started with alcohol of course. Would any of you happen to know if being a lush is an acquired or genetic trait? I have always loved 'the bottle', loved the movement of mouth around object. Perhaps this shows on my face and is another reason women don't like me. Ah well, maybe if I marred the current perfection of my skin I'd be more acceptable to them.

The alcohol then. Particularly vivid episodes include:

a) passing out in a stall in the men's room downstairs in a puddle of my own vomit and being discovered by two football players who then carried me to aforementioned friends room where he vacated his bed for me and then held my head up as I puked into his trashcan.

b) Passing out in the hallway of a girl's dorm across campus on a visit to see a fellow karachitie and then waking her at intervals during the night with a stirring rendition of the national anthem and assorted naats.

c) Falling asleep in a snowdrift on my way home from a party and being discovered by campus security, nearly frozen and deeply unconscious.

d) Sleeping through a security raid in a room lit with candles placed behind flourescent green bottle of MadDog 20/20 (ghetto wine, $2 a bottle) and regaining consciousness only when water was sprinkled in my face. For this I was given an alcohol ticket.

Where was my RA? Where was my brain?

My RA (lucky for me) was something of an icon on campus, being the captain of an ultimate Frisbee team called (no I'm not joking) 'team Crack'. She would have approved had she been interested. But she wasn't and, never having believed that people could actually care for you if they hadn't at some point either given birth to you or f...d you, I continued with my fruitless search for salvation in the dregs of a beer mug or the residue of a shot glass. If my money hadn't run out who knows where I would have been now, or even If I would be alive.

Anyway, it's not use crying over spilt kaluha.

The drugs started because they were free, initially. My erstwhile friends have since told me they would never have given them to me if they knew what was going to happen. Innocuously enough, it was the Simpson's that did me in. The Simpson's and the bong that made it all funnier than it normally was. Akira and the bong, Blade Runner and the 3 footer, Debbie does Dallas and the 6 footer. The pipe in the bottom of my dresser drawer where my roommate wouldn't see it. The joint in the ciggie pack. The chillum on the mantelpiece in someone's room. The hookah in the cupboard of an Indian friend.

This was all 'soft'. And for those who feel all this would not have happened if my parents had not let me go abroad and instead condemned me to the taunts of estrogen shrouded wraiths at St. Joseph's college let me just say the vagaries of a life where the only gun at your hear is your own are infinitely preferable to the local guns trained at those women who know what they want and are not afraid to disagree. My obsession with alcohol started in school in KARACHI, in dens in KARACHI, at party's in KARACHI. Last time i counted (and i count a lot) there were 5 drive in wine shops in and around defence where they dont ask you for a permit, a reason or an ID. Further, we would be fools to think drug abuse doesn't happen in our land of the pure. Growing up with my brother and his friends I don't' remember a time where their gatherings didn't involve a slab of hash. My brother had always refused to let me have a drag, saying 'girls don't do this'. I guess I made up for it at college. But in a gentler way with pot, which is marijuana, which is (as we oft repeated) non-addictive.

When I had run out of people to bum off I got a job as a menial in some campus office where I made enough to buy a bag every so often. Then one day we decided to go for a walk in a park where I was handed my first two hits of acid.

Probably one of the best trips I've ever had (if you don't count life that is). I discovered I loved acid. I loved the tracers, the softness of my own flesh, the bubbles in my bloodstream. I must have dropped about 14 hits in the space of a couple of months. Then off to a visit to a dear relative who greeted me with a tab of X. The week I spent with him I did X every day and the reason I had ostensibly gone to see him, to 'clean myself up', 'get my act together' (modern platitudes) was swept away in a haze of 'I feel goood, this feels so goood'.

Of course, we discussed in depth how none of this was really affecting us because (unlike the goras) we knew when to stop and how much was good for us.
Two people involved in the same folly will go to incredible lengths to shore up the shores of their mutual justifications with the most unlikely stories.
Back to college, and the hard part.

Opium snuck up on me like a wisp of smoke in a traffic jam at schon circle. Innocently enough handed to me in hookah at a party. Were they laughing I wonder now? 'Check out ...' they must have said.

Check me out indeed. Put me in a padded cell while you're at it.

Opium again the next day.

Opium the third day.

Where was I getting the money?

I lost my hymen to opium.

"We in the east place great value on the membrane that separates the women from the girls".

Two weeks, blissful weeks, a cocktail every day. I started dealing myself now that I had a 'connection' and I remember very vividly how important I used to feel when people would call and ask me to 'fix them up' with something. Then he moved, had to leave the town because the police were after him.

I think I'd rather not discuss the next few weeks if that's ok.

I think I realized (admitted) I had a problem the day I wrecked a dorm kitchen with my bare hands after my only (hard fought, slow won) female friend had dared to suggest I needed help and she was 'very disappointed in me'. She started crying and I picked up the nearest chair and threw it at her hard. It missed the wall and shattered. She sank into a corner and disappeared from my view as I systematically picked up every object not nailed down in that room and smashed it against the wall till it erupted. When I was done she ran past me. She wouldn't answer her door when I went and knocked on it later, begging to be let in saying I was sorry. How pitiful I must have sounded. But if she'd forgiven me that one time I have no doubts about how quickly I would have sunk back into it.

This is not going to be a 'and then she changed…' story. I didn't change. I just grew smarter and learned how to disguise my addictions. I lied and stole, waxed eloquent about how I had 'my act together now'. I realized I had a STD and had myself treated for it without letting anyone know except the staff at the medical center. In some corner of my mind festered the thought that I was forsaking the very foundations of my erstwhile faith. I justified it with the thought that "Allah", if he existed, had already given up on me and no amount of prayers; words and repentance could save me. In a twisted ways this spurred me on to greater heights of debauchery, the seeds of which were planted in me not in the 'decadent west' but in the 'repressed east' where our seemingly incomprehensible way of painting sex in purple painful colors creates a monster in every mans penis and a martyr in every woman's vagina.

Then two things happened that really hammered the reality check into the vacant space between my eyes where my self had once been. A close friend went into a coma after mixing drugs, alcohol with his prescription medicine, despite my having promised him I would 'look out for' him. I had to rush him to the hospital and couldn't remember my name when they asked me, couldn't remember his name when they wanted the forms filled. He was in there a week, and he never did drugs again.

The man I was head over heels with told me he couldn't deal with watching me implode and left me.

I went back to Karachi once in my three years at college. I was in college on a scholarship that was dependent on my maintaining a certain GPA. That wasn't really a problem for me until the last year, when my ability to think rationally and act intelligently was so damaged as to be almost redundant and I was asked to take a semester of and 'think things over'.

Karachi welcomed me with a blast of warm air through the pneumatic doors of the new Jinnah terminal. I hated being back, I hated every pest ridden, convention slain fiber of it. I wanted to go back, away from all these people who had expectations of me and into the more than welcoming arms of 'the crew' where I (and them) made each other secure in the knowledge that when everyone in the room is doing it it must be right.

Living in my house again, in the room where I grew up and dreamed of being famous one day, I felt a curious sense of displacement. As if I had traveled the world to run from a beast that would find me again the moment the flight I was on landed. The beast never went away, the beast wasn't in my room, the beast was in me.

Initially I would close my bedroom door, turn on the music and smoke some hash (so plentiful in Karachi it's ridiculous). I found that I was inhibited by this peculiar guilt that didn't let me go in front of my parents when I was high. This meant I could only smoke at night. I was automatically being forced to withdraw. My old school friends called and insisted I go out with them. My little sojourns out of the house served only to remind me what I misfit I was and always had been. I couldn't speak their language, I didn't wear their clothes, and the gaps (inherent and always stable) were as tangible as they had been.

Perhaps this would be the right time to tell you that I did well throughout my school years and was considered 'highly intelligent' but 'hampered by her inability to concentrate for long periods of time'. My grade report ensured I was admitted into one of the best schools in the country where my socio-economic background and interests were at direct variance to those of the majority of my classmates. I didn't bother trying to fit in because it was obvious that I couldn't, not just because of my lack of servility but also because of my unabashed interest in the group mechanics of the opposite sex. My interests were purely scientific (don't snort I'm serious) but in no time at all I was branded a 'slut'. For the remainder of my years there I was called this, blatantly and subtly, it was communicated to my parents through phone calls by mock gruff voices with girls giggling in the background. It was spray painted on the wall outside my house and dropped into my letterbox on plain notepaper addressed to my father.

If I ever have children I shall tell them, don't bother fighting, just join them.

I don't know if I'm blaming my circumstances or my 'somewhat traumatic childhood experience' (while I'm at it did I tell you about the way my father would pin me between his knees and systematically slap my face thuk thuk when I had done something bad like eat butter?) for the mess I found myself in. I am, to the best of my ability, trying to give you a picture of what demons lurked in the backgrounds of my cortex waiting to engage me in nocturnal conversation if I wasn't otherwise diverted. I'm not saying the waiter who dragged me under a table in my uncles restaurant and fondled me when I was young had anything to do with it. But the lack of compunction at losing my 'virginity' for a drug that dulled the voices might indicate how little it meant to me. Perhaps purity is not physical, and the little I had still lies under a table in a dilapidated building now, shrieking to deaf passers by to come and pick it up and restore it to owner.

Address unknown.

I finished college after six months of introspection, frustration, botched attempts to come clean. I tried counseling, therapy blah blah blah... lied through my teeth and took great pleasure in 'beating the silly white system' (is this a desi trait or not who knows). The real struggle began when I returned. It was as if my perception of reality was awake only in Karachi, everywhere else I was unable to see beyond the four walls or meadows of my immediate experience. This city of millions was the only truth I could comprehend, the only place where I could look at the bigger picture and catch glimpses of my slide in the pits of some Dylanesque hell. The emotional havoc my obviously tenuous state was wreaking on my parents gave me a sense of perspective. Throughout it all my father never complained, never accused, oh wait once he threw me out after I swallowed a bottle of alleve (for lack of a better option) but his gesture was appreciated.

In the actions that speak louder than words he had told me 'break the habit, but don't make a spectacle of yourself in the process". Its interesting to think how my parents must have been terribly aware of what was happening to me but were unable to break their conditioning against any kind of emotional closeness and actually talk about it. At dinner my mother would make sneering remarks about how all crime (real and imagined) was committed by 'druggies'. Its amazing how much scorn she was able to communicate with that one word.
My father has always been the strong, silent type.
There was no earth shattering moment of revelation for me..no Kodak moment where infinity approaced, took me gently in its arms and asked me to give up the foolishness and return into the human fold. Just as abruptly as I had started ...

I broke it. Stopped dead and have yet to go back. More power to me right?
I now hold a position where I am directly responsible for the emotional well being of over 40 people. I am considered to be one of the 'up and coming' players of my profession. And sitting here in my plush office in Karachi, where I breathe where I bleed and where I smile vacantly at all my new women friends I wonder how quickly they will fire me if word gets out about my 'past'.
Who would have thought it would one day be a dirty word. Is my paranoia unjustified? Is it in fact a remnant of the abuse? Do I flagellate myself into obedience to norms I don't believe in every day because I am serving out a penance for the perhaps undeserved guilt that Islamic culture has bred into me?
Now when I'm around people who drink, do drugs, lie around and make eyes at me I feel edgy, angry, compelled to get up and leave because I'm disgusted, or am I jealous? I remember reading about an experiment where you take a dog and place a bowl of his favorite food in front of him and then give him an electric shock whenever he approaches. The dog tries and tries and then lies there starving, what he wants is in front of him but he has yet to reach the point where the need overcomes the pain. Sometimes I feel this consuming anger at this society, which refuses to admit that women like me exist, are human and as deserving of help as any other person. I know if I come clean and actually talk to someone about what eats me from the inside out I will be ostracized, criticized and never forgiven.

The first to desert me will be my family, for 'washing my dirty linen in public'.

The second to desert me will be my employer who will feel I am 'bad publicity'.
Then it would be my boyfriend, he will bow to family pressure I know.' The twisted being lurking behind the perfect façade that he senses and attracts him will repel him if its origins are revealed.

Next it will be me, and I will wander around aimlessly once again, listening for the sound of the pied piper to draw me to the nearest large body of liquid.