Here’s what I know about time that you and I will find some agreement in: that it only flows downstream. This is obvious, yes… the arrow, once it leaves, won’t whoosh back to hit you. Heraclitus: No one ever steps in the same river twice, all that, baba. The flow itself can vary, however. Sometimes it’s express, spontaneous, swift - events fuse into one another without any distinction or demarcation, reifying into a whole that’s only qualified in hindsight. Take that morning for example: I was wrapping up some meeting with my manager who wasn’t very enthusiastic about letting me take my pet project to production. I’d known it would happen, so I was largely disinterested in his arguments, which were also very few and the opposite of cogent. “Park it,” he said suddenly, without any further explanation or qualification. “… and Kunal, please over-communicate with the new guy and teach him to over-communicate from day one. We don’t want him taking as much time as you did to open up, got it? We’re fast-moving over here, as you already know by now…” he said as he patted my shoulder and broke into forced laughter, the kind Indian uncles often use to punctuate a backhanded compliment or a veiled insult. I forced a smile back and planned his murder. Not that his laughter pissed me off, I just don’t respond very well to middle aged “dudes” calling me a dude. As soon as the meeting was over I almost immediately teleported to some shady corner of Koramangala, compressing the various manoeuvres like packing my bag and kickstarting my motorcycle to a millisecond. I met the dealer and exacted the transaction I was there for, and in another millisecond or so I was outside our housing complex in Sarjapur. I was waiting for Priny to meet me downstairs for some strong filter coffee in weak styrofoam cups, at the idli shop right next to our complex.

When he arrived he looked shaggy and unkempt, which was not unlike him. His otherwise cheerful demeanour that’s both a form and function of his rotund appearance was missing, so I guessed that he’d probably argued with either his girlfriend or his mother in the past hour or so. He was wearing casual shorts and a t-shirt that said in bold, loud letters: “FART LOADING…”. There was a progress bar underneath the print, three quarters through. I asked the counter staff for two filter coffees and grabbed two 5-star bars from the jar right in front of me. I offered one to Priny but he refused. I asked him if he’d been to the office. When I’d left that morning he was still snoring loudly on the couch, so I wasn’t expecting him to. He hadn’t. I then asked him what he had been up to all day, but he averted his gaze and took his pack of reds out. Alright. I shrugged and bit into my 5-star, eventually getting to the matter at hand.

“Look, it’s 200 micros, but it’s possible it may be 300,” I said, washing some of the 5-star residue stuck between my teeth down with the coffee. “I mean, I’m not sure. The guy seemed like he was in a hurry, and possibly in trouble, par woh toh, you know… comes with the territory, all that.” I continued sipping slowly.

“Kitna?” He asked, snapping out of whatever he was mentally preoccupied by, more annoyed than pensive now.

“Five for two. Here,” I looked around to check for any human presence within our vicinity, and then produced a little plastic bag that held two nearly microscopic and infinitely black dots that were to fuel the night’s adventures. “Here, can you see them?” I asked because I couldn’t see them very well myself. There wasn’t anyone around, so I placed them against the setting sun and squinted my eyes a bit. “Ayy look macha, 2500 bucks each. Damn, you can barely see them!”

Priny was glowering. He stubbed his cigarette, which was only a quarter consumed. I had unknowingly placed the straw that broke this fat fuck’s back. “Fiiive thousandd??” I could picture the question marks and exclamation points multiplying, expanding, and then exploding over his head. “Kunal, bhai, what the fuck? Scum these local dealers are, I’m telling you,” and then he switched to Kannada and started rambling. I kept nodding every now and then, breaking eye contact often. Pranav, born and brought up to his (and later, mine) absolute ruin in Bangalore, hated Kannadigas with a passion… being a Kannadiga himself. Observing how his face contorted throughout his ramble, I presumed the sentences following were mostly just cuss and crass directed against them than me, but I could have been wrong. It’s funny to be friends and flatmates with someone who hates his own kind that passionately. Not that I’m any different. Birds of a feather. Born in and summoned from Delhi, I do despise mostly everyone I know from my city in some deeply visceral way I can’t quite explain. Sometimes I also love them intensely, but I can’t decipher those whys, either. So who knows what this really is: this notably Indian sickness where you simultaneously want to erase and embrace your own race. Priny eventually calmed down upon realising that his rant may as well be in French or some other odd fucking language with weird intonations and weirder glottal stops that I was too ignorant and unbothered to care about.

“Done? Ho gaya?”

“Anyway…” he let out a deep exhale. “Behenchod, I think we have some leftover alcohol from last weekend. Maal is also sorted.” he informed me. A lull. I caught some interesting birds fly against the orange sky over Sarjapur lake. I wondered where they were headed to. Hopefully away from here. I felt happy for them. A minute or so passed, pregnant with silence as I watched Priny’s residual anger evaporate. I took a lateral step towards the dustbin nearby and dunked my coffee cup in, watching some residual liquid splash out. “Although, I wonder if we should mix things up. Alcohol, weed, and LSD could have funny interactions…” Priny said.

“Yeah, I have my doubts about that, too. I dunno. I could do a reddit search maybe but it might confuse us further.”

“I did check while you went to see that behenchod - ” before he could continue, I interrupted.

“First, that behenchod was forced. It’s fine macha, you can plug in some Kannada gaali there, I won’t mind. I mean,” I mulled for a second. “It doesn’t really land, you don’t really place it well. Plus you’re too nice…” I gobbled the remaining bar. “And what’s the big fucking deal, why are you so angry anyway? 5000 bucks is a good deal, dude.” I said, chewing my way through the sentence.

“No boss, you don’t get it. He robbed you because you clearly aren’t a local, I know. These madarchods, I tell you. I would’ve gone with you, but then Smriti finally decided to end her week long silence today. Probably because it’s a fucking Friday. I’d have gone otherwise, and I’m telling you, I can guarantee he wouldn’t have asked for anything more than 3000.” he finished and looked away, his confidence a bit unsure. “3500, max. No more than that!”

I felt glad I didn’t have to bring the girlfriend thing up myself. I’ve gotten good at reading him and correlating causations. So I averted my gaze, inched my foot forward to indicate that we should probably start walking towards our flat. “She called you? How’s she doing anyway?” I asked, only half interested in the conversation that was to follow.

“She’s fine. She’ll probably dump me in a few months, so I think I should probably dump her first.” He said, annoyed. This rascal.

“Damn, competitive breakups? Guess I’m your cheerleader, then. Imagine me in a skirt cheering for you. My hairy belly popping out of a bright pink spaghetti top. I don’t have pom-poms, but I’m making do. Smriti probably also has some cheerleaders on her side, also men, but invariably fitter and nicer looking than us two bums. Big biceps, waxed chests, washboard abs. However, they’re not me… see?” I said and started miming a token cheer-leader dance. “P to the R to the A…” he finally broke into a warm chuckle and gestured me to stop embarrassing myself in public, something I’m good at.

He eased up, which was important. Our previous experiment had been with a 180 microgram tab, which left a deep impression. I had stories to tell for days to people who were very visibly disinterested. The guy we usually scored all of our adventures from was a shifty, awkward local. He hadn’t sold us a fluke last time, so I had felt confident about those microdots. He did however mention that he wasn’t sure whether these were 200 or 300 micros, which made me a bit anxious because I wasn’t comfortable trying anything north of 200. Drugs were, for all intents and purposes, strictly recreational for us, and were usually experimented with once every fortnight within the confines of our shared two bedroom flat, which also harboured off-colour self loathing and a big fucking spider that we never fucked around with and referred to as BFS.

We experimented that way because there wasn’t really much else to do there. We had embarrassed ourselves at the pubs and the clubs enough times over the past 3 years, and the prospect of checking out some novel fusion cuisine at some hip new restaurant or cafe induced about as much enthusiasm in us as the Pythagorean theorem. Drugs were somewhat easier to come by in Bangalore, which for us was its only saving grace. That and the weather. The fucking weather. Bangaloreans usually open with this tailored response when you ask them what they like about their city - that the weather’s pretty nice. They forget to mention that the lakes catch fire and that it’s always dusty and under construction. Story goes that this was supposed to be a low-key retirement city for Kannadigas spread elsewhere in the state, but the IT boom turned out to be both the boon and the curse this city now bore. Dare to drive three kilometres to your office situated on the fifth floor of some prosaic tech park situated as far away from life as possible after 8 AM and this would become sufficiently evident.

But hey, the weather’s nice.

It was that day, though. May not seem like it now, but I was less bitter than usual because spring was coming to an end. Spring’s never been good for me. Look, I love the sun and the flowers as much any normal human being does. I recall chasing butterflies as a kid and being jovial about it, too. It’s all the pollen in the air that doesn’t let me be. Deviated septum: I end up sneezing pretty much non-stop, breaking records on a minute-by-minute basis. Makes me bitter and sullen and moody every now and then, spring. That day though it was just good old Sarjapur dust. Dust I could bear, dust I still bear.

Priny kept ranting about Smriti for a while in his native tongue and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t called Pooja in a week. We’d been in a sexless relationship for a while - sexless not only because it was a long distance one, but also because she was asexual. No, really. That was the reason we sort of got together, because I was asexual too. Little did she know that I wasn’t particularly asexual. Actually, even I didn’t know. Eventually I found out what it was: good old fear. I realised I was just afraid of sex back then. Terrified. So I’d basically intellectualise my way out of it in any way possible. I remember my guy friends being pretty angry at me for this considering opportunities were scarce for them. Then Pooja and I tried some furtive fucking in her car while I was in Delhi some time ago - just to see if we weren’t fooling ourselves about the whole asexual thing. That’s when I’d found out that I had indeed been fooling myself: I ended up developing a strong and possibly unhealthy libido afterwards. She did not, and therein lied the tragedy. I was more or less perpetually frustrated about that aspect of my life back then: all the dramatic intensity that’s characteristic of romantic relationships between inexperienced adults, with barely any of the sexual release that I found myself yearning for. My spine, composed entirely of butter, ensured I didn’t dare end something that was dead to begin with. Realising I could probably call her during the weekend I decided to focus on our activities at hand. I ended my episode of self absorption as soon as Priny was done with his ramble and unlocked the door to our flat.

“I’m going to order two pizzas, macha.” Priny said as he slowly lowered his butt on to the beanbag.

“Throw in some garlic bread too, no? For munchies?”

“Munchies? We’re mixing?”

“Just in case this microdot turns to be a fluke. Actually,” I thought for a second. “Add the garlic bread anyway. The lunch at the office was especially horrible today, I binned most of it. I’ll eat something before we pop the dots.”

“Fine macha. I’ll also get some wings!”

“Man, fuck you, fat fuck… add some for me too. Get the 12 piece combo, actually.”

“What the fuck? You’re fatter than I am!”

“I’m taller too, which negates it. Anyway, I don’t plan on eating them all together, gaandu. I doubt I can. I’ll reheat and eat them in the morning if there are any leftovers.”

“Ifff there are. Major if there. I guess we’ll know by the end of this trip. Heh.”

While he placed the order I started arranging our supplies for the night carefully on the coffee table situated right in front of the TV set.

“You know macha, we should probably start working out sometime soon.” Priny said as he threw his phone aside on the sofa and broke into a loud yawn.

“Ordered? Accha, can you pass me the rolling papers?” I said.

I put the plastic bag with two microdots in our unused ashtray and started on the joints. Once I was done rolling I placed them neatly alongside the plastic bag and sighed with relief. “All in due time,” I said to myself, and made my way to the balcony for a smoke. I usually dread going to the balcony because of BFS, but that’s more because of me than him.

Priny left to take a shit in the meantime. Our food arrived after maybe an hour. I opened a can of ice cold Tuborg and started wolfing through most of the garlic bread. I had already finished a single of JD to loosen up a bit in the meantime, the light buzz had made me even hungrier.

When Priny came out you could tell he was lighter, not just literally, but spiritually.

“Did you…” I started as I studied his face to figure out what had entailed in the meantime. “Were you smoking weed while taking a shit? What the fuck?”

“Kunal, bro…” he said, grinning.

“Man. Fuck. So now we’re mixing anyway. Behenchod, you were the one apprehensive about the mixing business in the first place!” I kept shouting through my mouthful of garlic bread. Fuck it, I thought, I’m taking the microdot now. Inebriation was perhaps the only thing I felt somewhat competitive about; I couldn’t let anyone start their trip before me. At the very least I didn’t like being the last one - my ego doesn’t allow this. Priny sat down on our couch with a thump and I opened the little plastic bag and placed the dot on my index finger. I gestured at Priny to do the same, except I also shouted at him to be extra careful because if he dropped it we were unlikely to ever find it again, since it really was microscopic. Thankfully he was careful enough and managed to place it underneath his tongue properly. We put up Mullholland Drive and I lit a cigarette.

We continued watching the film for the next hour. I was annoyed - the film wasn’t going anywhere and my trip sure as fuck didn’t want to. I felt normal, more normal in fact than I usually do.

“He probably sold you a fluke, macha.” Priny said, annoyed. “This is why I hate these fuckers, these Kannadigas, incapable they are…” I don’t think anyone can be stoned and dejected at the same time, but he seemed stoned enough to be dejected. And dejection is probably what led him to get stoned in the first place.

“Man, just pass me the joint. You saved some, no? I don’t want to light a new one.”

“Yeah, I only smoked like, a quarter..” he said and passed me a deformed little doobie.

I snuffed my cigarette out into the ashtray with some aggression, and quickly lit up the joint and slowly exhaled an entire cumulus. My head immediately felt lighter. That’s when my phone started ringing. I took it out of my pocket to check out what it had notified me about. What I saw next arrested my attention: so much so that I completely forgot about the notification. I saw letters wobbling, floating around. I broke my gaze and looked at Priny and watched him exhale a fat cloud that was trying to morph into caterpillar, not unlike the one in Alice in Wonderland. And then it hit me.

“This isn’t weed, it’s most definitely not this weed” I mumbled to myself. I glanced at Priny again and it seemed like he too had gone quiet for what felt like eternity. Said eternity passed: I broke the continuum.

“I… brother?”

“Yeah. It’s legit, bro…”

“I don’t think Mulholland Drive is supposed to be this colourful… or this wack…” I got absorbed in the colours for a while. Everything felt exciting - even things that were otherwise boring or commonplace. My phone’s muted wallpaper assumed fractal patterns and the notification bubbles started wobbling around, the activity rings on my smartwatch were glowing brighter than usual. The wall clock’s second hand started sweeping instead of ticking. I was too engrossed and engaged with everything to form any cogent thoughts, let alone verbalise them. Priny was probably going through the same. This is fun, I thought. Fun is when recreational drugs… recreate! How embarrassing.

“Hey, you wanna go for a walk? Just downstairs. Let’s try to not hit the main road, just neeche we’ll roam. If this is 300 micros, I wouldn’t want to be lost in some shady gulley in Sarjapur.” I said. Everything around me was assaulting my senses a bit too much and I wanted to breathe.

Priny was staring intently at the balcony. “Dude. I think BFS is growing even bigger. Look!”

“Wow, yeah. Listen, let’s just go outside.” I said without looking at the BFS, realising that a bad trip was guaranteed if I had.

“Alright, cool…”

We left the house immediately and decided that we were too high to take the elevator. The problem was that the elevator’s button were misrouted - the button for 4th floor led to 5th, and vice versa. We were conscious about this during our trip so both Priny and I decided to take the stairs instead. Mistake. For a while it felt like we were stuck inside an Escherian loop. We were sure we had climbed down four floors, but it felt like each successive stairwell connected to the one prior, and I started panicking. “How long?” I asked Priny. “Almost there, dude. What’s the rush?” My panic grew with each descent. Fuck, should’ve just taken the elevator, I thought. Priny was quiet. Maybe he didn’t realise we were stuck in a loop? Or maybe he did, he just didn’t want a verification to preserve his own sanity. I realised I didn’t care anymore, but before I could express my panic to him, Priny opened a door and we were outside. Pheeeeeww. The walkway from there led straight to our society’s poorly maintained garden, full of plants that were rarely ever cared for. What do we pay maintenance for, I thought. We finally came across this vine that looked remarkably green, almost fluorescent. It probably wasn’t, but, you know.

“Look, look at that spiral at the end of the tip, expanding, curving inwards,” Priny said. “Is it expanding for you as well? I think the flowers are also changing colour.”

“I.. I guess I see some expansion.. but it looks pretty regular to me, dude. And the flowers are… maroon? What colour are you seeing? I think it’s hit you hard, man. Shit, you smoked a quarter of that fat joint too. You’re proper fucked, bro.”

“Who fucking cares, LOOK AT THE SPIRAL! Fractals… Remember Julia sets? Did they make you code that shit up at your college? That was the coolest shit ever man, I swear.” Priny said, excited.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Eh fuck it. You know what macha, let’s go see the flowers in the main garden. These ones are boring and they’re not even changing colours anymore.”

And so we started walking towards our main garden, averting our gaze from people who were downstairs for their post dinner walks. This constituted families on a stroll, couples hand-in-hand but visibly distant, people on phone calls with their families or spouses or friends, and some really old people farting about, wandering aimlessly. We reached the garden and Priny immediately pointed at these irises, their purple even more brilliant under the warm glow of the floodlights. I looked at the flowers and watched them grow into full bloom and wither and die and repeat their life cycle endlessly. For a while I was transfixed. This shit was definitely 300 micros, I thought, if not more. I was definitely unprepared.

“Hey, listen. I think I might have to lie down for a bit. I’m seeing way more shit than I’m prepared for right now.” I said after a while.

“What? Already? We haven’t even rearranged the stars, dude. Remember? Tushar mentioned that at work. Sounds like the coolest shit ever.”

I remained silent and looked above and all I saw was a thick cover of grey stratus, rapidly flowing onwards, growing greyer against the night sky. I couldn’t see any stars, of course I couldn’t, it was fucking Bangalore after all. There’s too much light pollution here, too much dust, too much traffic, too much hubris. Cosmic light doesn’t pipe through to this city anymore.

“You do that. Look, it’s going to be a long trip anyway. If I feel better, I’ll come down after a bit. I’ll just paint in the meantime, I don’t know. Do some artsy-fartsy shit and send to Pooja later.”

“Hmm, ok. Yeah I’ll walk around for a bit. Call me if you need me, boss.”

I reached my bedroom and lied down. As soon as I closed my eyes I realised that it was a mistake. LSD bombards you with infinite kaleidoscopic patterns against the canvas that is the absolute blackness of your conjunctiva. You enter an internal world that’s at least as interesting as the outer world, if not more. A rapid and endless metamorphosis that’s difficult to articulate and even more difficult to make sense of. Perhaps the inability to articulate lies in the difficulty of comprehension. Colourful patterns morph and blend into each other, never settling on any single shape or form you might be predicting while going through the ordeal. It eventually got a bit maddening for me, so I opened my eyes. I found some of the patterns of my imagination superimposed on the walls around me. Aware that I was simply hallucinating this, I just kept staring intently. They reminded me of the house I had grown up in. My mother used to draw geometric patterns on the wall during her bouts of absolute boredom and ennui. It wasn’t particularly great, our house - just a room and a half. It was barely enough for us three back then, me and my parents. I have no siblings, which is either because my parents realised that our house couldn’t accommodate more humans, or because they stopped sleeping together. Probably both. There was this huge mirror in the main room though, anachronistic and unfitting for a house like ours. It was a bit too grand and baroque, outlined by a beautiful wooden panel. It was a family heirloom, and had been inherited by my father from his father who had inherited from his father, and so on. The mirror was the only interesting thing in our room back then, and the only thing that kept me occupied as I traced the intricate carvings on its wooden frame with my index finger and studied my reflection while my parents quarrelled about something or the other in the background. I tried to imagine those carvings again on acid and hallucinated them intertwine and form beautiful interlocks against the walls. That’s when I had the idea of looking at the mirror in my bathroom. It was a regular bathroom mirror, set in a floral frame which I thought could be interesting to look at, given my state. There was a layer of dust and some toothpaste stains on it which I wiped off first, but instead of focusing on the floral frame, I looked straight at my face, where my eyes eventually caught my eyes, arresting my attention.

I watched the tip of my nose twirl and unwind and twirl again. My ears wiggled. As I kept staring into my dilated pupils, time cracked. I got transported into the room of my childhood, as the mirror in my bathroom transmuted itself into the family heirloom. It reflected back the room I had grown up in. It felt strange and familiar at the same time. My features slowly started losing precision as my reflection grew younger. My mother was standing behind me, preparing me for school. Assiduous and methodical as always. Done applying some kajal underneath my eyes, she was neatly combing my hair. She seemed happy in a way I no longer remember her anymore. My father wandered about in the background, looking for his motorcycle keys. He asked my mother coldly if she knew where the keys were. She didn’t, and I watched her smile in the reflection quickly evaporate. My father eventually found the key. I watched him gaze laterally towards me. This is how he always said goodbye, averting his own eyes to stare directly into mine, always in a rush to leave. I met his gaze and he nodded his head, without betraying any particular emotion. The exchange was complete. He told my mother to stop grooming me so much, that it’s useless. My mother quickly turned red, beaming with anger, but she shut her mouth as soon as she opened it. I didn’t understand. My father left and as he closed the door I heard a loud thud and snapped back to reality.

I realised that LSD+mirrors are probably a far worse combination than LSD or any other recreational drug. I washed my face and took a few deep breaths, staring into the sinkhole. I felt like submerging into its deep blackness but then from it I saw emerging a spider. Before it could emerge I twisted open the tap again to full flow and watched it fight for its life. Eventually it gave up. I turned the tap off and took a few deep breaths. I started looking into the mirror again. Maybe I’m onto something, I thought. My pupils were still very dilated, little black marbles, deep and hopeless. I was trying to find something inside of them. Maybe a minute passed, maybe an hour. I don’t remember, but eventually I was unstuck in time again.

I came back to a different house: our current, bigger one. My father’s business had worked out, hence. I don’t remember any of us being particularly enthusiastic about the move. I was 14. My mother had started living with her parents and so I would only see her during summer vacations. Ironic - we had gone from living a constrained life, us three in that matchbox apartment, where we didn’t exist as individuals with separate aspirations but rather as a unified whole trying to survive - and now it was just me and dad cohabitating with this gaping emptiness of the new house. Bigger the house, further away the people, I thought. I think it was largely because of me that my mother had moved out. I was unwilling to grow up according to her, which basically meant that I hadn’t stopped wetting my bed yet. It wasn’t intentional, obviously. I mean, I doubt anyone would do that sort of thing intentionally, unless it’s a fetish of some sort. I was a kid, and therefore innocent, but my mother thought otherwise. She felt that this was my way of getting back at her for scolding me too harshly for my poor academic performance. I think it didn’t register on her that I was plainly uninterested in studies and also quite dumb. She had believed me to be special, which is a common belief most mothers delude themselves into. And oh, if only I knew what I was capable of: she had even started echoing my class teacher’s sentiments to me during dinner. Needless to say, I didn’t converse much, and so came off a bit aloof and cold. My dad had, on multiple occasions, tried to beat this out of me, this nonchalant attitude. It was anything but.

I still see my reflection in the family heirloom, that ornate mirror. It had been placed here as well, in this new house, in the main hall. I remember losing interest in it at this point in time. You could say that its frame, its most interesting feature, stopped producing any emotional effect in me. Maybe I didn’t find the tribal carvings captivating anymore. Or maybe I found better things to keep myself interested. My reflection now did have some precision compared to my previous time-jump: I saw some of my features prototypical, shaping up into what they would eventually look like in the now now. My nose had actually already metamorphosed and assumed the shape it would keep for the rest of my life - twisted at the very end, a witch’s nose, proper. I didn’t like it. There was acne on both of my cheeks and I could physically feel the burning sensation throughout my face. My lips were already full, with a dull pink tinge. A few years into adulthood they’ll turn purple. But my attention was fixated towards this strand of hair that was trying to curl, lying vertically across my forehead. I tried to straighten it out. There was always a possibility that this would happen, that I would inherit my mother’s hair. I didn’t want to. And so I tried to straighten it out in the reflection. I could hear my mother shouting in the background. I’m suspended in time but her voice exists across this continuum, which I find funny. I remember this. She was visiting that day to check up on me. My father however had something he was desperate to discuss, so he had taken her to the room adjacent, resulting in the current argument. None of this was unexpected. As I started straightening that one strand out, all of the others started curling in. I tried to aggressively comb them down. The argument in the background started growing louder. I don’t think it was about me. They’re just shouting at each other due to their petty concerns about money and shit, this is normal. Come to think of it, I doubt mother left because of me. As I tried to comb my curls down in this memory I hear their voices become more and more hostile. Tears start to trickle down my eyes: please obey, please stop, don’t curl, I tell my hair. My mother pled my father to leave her alone, so he came out and started walking towards me, still not looking fully into the mirror, only at the reflection of my eyes. I placed my palm on my heart and felt a loud thump beam me back to present.

The beats grew louder, proportionate to every inch I moved away from the mirror. I took a deep breath and wiped my face with a towel. My heart felt like it was going to rip itself out of my chest and leave without so much as a goodbye note. I sat down on the couch in the hall. Priny was still roaming downstairs. I hoped his trip was going better than mine. I started getting assailed by all sorts of voices in the meantime as I rocked back and forth, gripping my forehead. I wondered if I was going through a psychotic break. I had only read about it in books before, some anecdotes here and there. Maybe. Probably not. My heart still felt like it wanted to leave. Stay. But I want to leave. You too? A regular Friday night. Can’t you do anything right? It’s just a bad trip, it happens. Only to you. Can’t keep it together. I didn’t know it would result in this. I didn’t expect this. You did. You SOUGHT it. I did not. Can’t stay out of trouble, you. I didn’t know! Don’t lie! You did! Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Why? Those were… the circumstances… No. But it was difficult. It’s difficult for everyone. How could I have known? Stop cribbing. I’m not! Weak-willed. Weak-willed?

Come to think of it, it’s better if some relationships end without a goodbye note. Let sleeping thoughts lie.

I’m glad I had Priny on my recents so I only had to tolerate the pain of navigating through this acid-induced rippling seascape that was my phone’s screen for a few taps. I called him and asked him to come upstairs quickly. I made sure my voice intoned unbridled panic and distress and hung up before he could say anything, to impress upon him the urgency of the situation. I don’t think it worked: for an eternity and a half he didn’t arrive. I waited. The voices in my head meanwhile mellowed down into a song I was quite fond of back then…

My steps iterate my shame // how come every outcome is such a comedown?

“You alright, boss?” Priny said, standing right next to me.

“No, I’m not.” I said. “When did you arrive?”

“Just now. Came as quickly as I could. You look… spooked? Fatt gayi?” he said and passed me some water.

“Haan. Just stay. I think this was a bad fucking idea.”

“Alright. Eat something. That should help.”

Priny passed me some wings and put up some harmless film to distract both of us while repeating to me constantly that it’ll be over soon. I remember the movie being really colourful - as was everything else - and full of mostly harmless self-aware humour that I was bored of but could tolerate. The film probably offended no one, which is why it offended me. Priny was really liking it, so I decided to argue with him about his shitty taste in films to pass time. That consumed me for a while because Priny when he tries can actually come up with convincing arguments for his unabashed mental retardation. Almost ten hours had passed since the trip began and so my senses weren’t being assaulted that badly. I was coherent and somewhat cogent, and so was Priny. The auditory hallucinations had mostly mellowed down into a mild sing-song, not particularly comforting, but not intimidating either.

“Bad, bad fucking trip, man.” I said as I took a cigarette out to greet the sun. 5 AM.

“Happens, macha. I think we should crash. I think I can sleep if I try hard enough.”

“Yeah, I’ll try too, I guess…” I said as I popped my cigarette’s filter, looking at the sun, inquisitive, unamused.

I woke up at 3 PM the following day. Priny had woken up an hour ago and was waiting for me. I averted his gaze as I walked to the kitchen to fix myself some coffee. Once I was done, I grabbed a cup for him as well, and sat down on the bean bag right next to the couch. I rummaged through my pockets to find my pack of cigarettes only to get informed by Priny that we finished them all last night.

“But worry not,” he beamed. “here.”

“Man, fuck… I’m not smoking reds.”

“Well, feel free to go outside and get your menthols then, pussy.” he said as he lit one and splayed himself on the couch, clutching his pack and breaking into a shit eating grin.

Slave to my addiction and captive to my laziness, I forced the packet out of his hand reluctantly and took one cigarette out. After blowing a puff or two I opened up and told him all that had happened, at least how I remembered it.

“Funny, so it started with you looking into the mirror?”

“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t have. I mean, all the LSD vets pretty much warn against doing so.”

“Yeah man. Does weird shit to you. All sorts of distortions. Some reddit comment mentioned that it can serve like a gateway too, and that’s probably what happened in your case, I think.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute and focused on my cigarette and coffee. My relationship with smoking is very much like a parent’s relationship with their newborn - I will eventually resent it for the terrible payoff, but for the time being it brings me bliss, and so my love for it is unbiased, untainted.

“It was 300 micros, I think. The garden got a bit weird for me too, after a while…” Priny said.

“Probably. What did you do, then?”

“Oh, I just ended up calling Smriti. I started describing my experience to her in real time, on the call itself. She said she wants to try it too. Maybe sometime next month.”

“Ah, fuck. I don’t think I’m trying any psychedelics for a while, man. Don’t think I’m built for this. Kinda makes me wonder how Thompson managed to do all that shit on a daily basis in Fear and Loathing… like I’m sure if I were to abuse this thing over the course of just a week I’d end up with irreversible brain damage.”

“You’re overreacting boss.” Priny said as he exhaled a fat cloud. “Just stay away from the mirrors,” he said and put on a harmless giggle.

“Gaand mara.”

“It’s just funny to me macha… I mean, it’s so hard to get you to look at a mirror normally, but then you go ahead and spend like half of your trip staring into one.. I dunno, it’s comical to me, like I said. Although I get it -”

“What do you mean?” I cut him off. “I check the mirror all the time, though?” I asked. Was it curiosity welling up in my stomach?

“Well, not properly, I mean. Whenever we’re out shopping, for example. You really don’t look at yourself properly. Like you straight up try a shirt on and walk towards me - “Kaisa? Theek? Sahi hai?”” Priny said and drank some coffee. “I mean, ask Pooja. She’s the one who noticed this, actually. That you don’t really make eye contact with yourself. Speaking of, you should probably call her, macha.”

“What?” I asked, absentmindedly.

“Call her. She messaged me this morning, she was trying to reach out to you all night.” Priny said.

“No, not that. The mirror… I dunno? I mean I’m sure I look at it, dude.” I said, in a weak half-protest.

“Okay look, this is becoming somewhat pointless so let’s end this discussion soon and get some podi afterwards, okay? You just… shy away a gaze. Like, a cursory glance. As if you’re in a hurry to be somewhere, to get somewhere. Like you don’t actually want to do it, you don’t want to look at yourself. Probably because you’re a serious dude. Things to do and places to be. That’s what I think. Pooja thinks differently, but it’s better if you ask her about that. I don’t really understand her angle, some hokey pokey psychological stuff she says da. You know, women… I tell her that you’re one of those utilitarians. Isn’t that the case?” he said as he got up from the couch.

Part of the reason why I’m always curious about time is how easily our own mental perception of both it and the surrounding space can affect its flow. It’s a constant that varies in accord to both perception and stimuli, I mean to say. Perhaps I’m not being clear. At times events bleed into each other without any notice - when you’re having fun, as they say. Overheard in a discussion yesterday at work: “Man, I’m 25 already… feels like only yesterday we celebrated my 24th!” Sometimes an event, no matter how microscopic, short, or insignifcant exerts such strong gravitational force due to its hypnotic boredom that time slows down to a crawl. There’s usually waiting of some form attached to such events: “The doctor will see you now!” - relief, finally, as you get up. All that said, I remember being lodged onto that bean bag for a thousand years before I could open my mouth to answer Priny’s question.