Divine Comedy

What happened after a young girl took a drug in Dubai

I am not your typical drug user. I have no penchant for hedonism, I’m not particularly inclined towards the idea of enlightenment, nor am I eagerly seeking a temporary respite from the dreariness of daily life. I am the epitome of normalcy—young, middlingly attractive, freshly independent and generally content.

Like most people in their twenties, I have experimented with marijuana, done a sparing amount of cocaine, and popped a pill of E at a rave or two, but that is pretty much the scope of my experience. This has as much to do with an intellectual fear of losing control, as with strict legislation against drugs in the city I call home, the land of skyscrapers and Sharia law, Dubai.

Regardless, I firmly believe that no amount of narcotic conditioning could have prepared me for what salvia had to offer. Researchers claim that salvia has the highest hallucinogenic potential per gram of any known naturally occurring substance. Its effects are profound, consciousness- altering and short lived (but not disappointingly so).

Quality is key, and what dealers won’t tell you is that the concentration of Salviatorin A, the active opioid ingredient in salvia, varies dizzyingly depending on how the plant is chemically treated, dried and smoked. I’ve encountered my share of people who found taking salvia underwhelming and, without exception, they were buying cheap and from the wrong people.

On the surface Salvia looked perfectly innocuous: ash- green leaves, with an odour that was difficult to describe— woody, with a whiff of earthy bitterness, like a mixture of nutmeg, honey and crushed neem leaves. I decided on my instrument: a slim wooden pipe the locals called a midwakh. It caught fire lustily, breaking into varicoloured embers, smoke hitting the back of my throat with a metallic coldness.

Within minutes, everything became much more of itself; curves were rounder, edges sharper, and colours occurred in gradients. The beam of my headlights falling on the tarmac gave the impression of faded denim at the centre, trailing off into an indigo blackness. My pores were widened, puckering wherever hair had been ripped out by my eager beautician.

A warmth bloomed on my tongue; throbbing like an old wound, it squeezed downwards from the roots of my teeth to the meeting of my buttocks, lingered teasingly, before lowering itself into my groin, darkening and concentrating there, breaking my nerves into filaments of fire and song.

The truth of the universe is orgasm.

Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances. / Something hauls me through air— / Thighs, hair, flakes from my heels. / I unpeel— / Dead hands, dead stringencies. / Now I foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. / And I am the arrow, / The dew that flies, suicidal, / At one with the drive / Into the red eye, / The cauldron of morning.

Sylvia Plath’s lines burst through my mind as I, arms akimbo like an awkward but determined super-heroine, started tunnelling into the eye of the sun; underneath and around me nebulas swelled and glistened and my ears filled with the sound of invisible wings beating. I was ascending toward a one-dimensional point of energy, the nexus of all understanding.

I held between cupped palms the answers to existential questions that had evaded philosophers for centuries. They were all horrifyingly simple, perfectly rational and absolutely indisputable. But even as I vowed to never let them slip through the amniotic seal of my fingers, they started to effervesce, and the silence came rushing in.

Throughout my ‘high’, the knowledge that I was seat- belted securely in a clichéd four-wheel drive, as it slouched along the winding back roads of Karamah, remained intact. My best friend sat quietly by my side, bespectacled, balding, naïve, and impossibly kind. I turned towards him, and mustered what I could of my now defunct enlightenment.

T: “Turn on the audio recording on your phone.”

H: “Are you sure you want to do this? We could get into serious trouble.”

T: “I need to save what I can, please, please!”

H: “Alright, go ahead.”

T: “If you sit down on a sofa in any given position, and stay absolutely still… if you don’t move a centimetre, a millimetre, a micrometer, don’t even breathe too heavily, just by virtue of gravity’s existence, you will sink in a tangential manner, and eventually fall to the ground. We are in perpetual motion, you see. Can’t you sense the pull of the earth? It feels like I am being dragged into its core, becoming part of its piston.”

H: “I think it just hit you.”

T: “Actually, it’s already gone…”

H: “Take another puff.”

H wanted to hug me again in the parking lot. I saw the longing stream out of his navel, and heard his hair crackle where our bodies met. My legs were shaking like a newborn calf’s, and I must have had the same innocent and bewildered expression in my eyes, because an almost maternal protectiveness flashed across his face. Overhead, the tube lights flickered and buzzed like fireflies. He wasn’t hungry, but I had ratatouille on my mind so we headed to La Petit Maison.

The doors opened and we found ourselves at the lip of a beefy fog. Nearby, in a silver plate, a pigeon gushed raspberry reduction out of its severed gullet. A recent convert to vegetarianism, flush with the self-righteousness only fresh convictions bring, I felt entitled to a soliloquy.

What we celebrate above all is our ‘consciousness’, but even those of us who believe in animal consciousness think of theirs as less so, a watered down derivative of our own. The truth is, at most points in life we are a compendium of very few things: where we are (not in a geographical way but in the sense of ‘truck to the right, Lexus to the left’), what we think (‘turn right at the signal’), what we feel (‘singular and overwhelming restlessness’), and what we sense (‘amid our body’s great vacuum of unawareness, two palms touching the steering wheel’). I am positive animals can manage at least that: one emotion, one thought, one sensation at one point of time. How then can we assume them less than us, in the quantum or spiritual sense of things?

I stopped mid-mental-harangue, registering both the chaos around me and the fact that it was greatly enhanced. I could sense dissonance—in lovers’ glances directed indiscreetly at their distant and unyielding objects of affection, the waiter’s thin stride and thinner greeting voice, the sea of feverish chatter that held in its bosom innumerable uncomfortable silences.

I was profoundly disappointed in the human race, so disappointed in fact, that I carelessly put the entire serving fork into my mouth and chomped on it greedily. The burnt-copper taste of blood jolted me out of my conceited reverie. Self-consciousness was the perfect catalyst to augment my strange, soporific aloneness.

Shit, don’t you dare blush, don’t you dare apologise. Distract yourself. Think about what you were re-reading today… Gatsby? Gatsby! Don’t you think the real tragedy of it is close to that of Shaw’s Pygmalion? Not the selfishness of our desire and the emptiness of what it ceaselessly and unreasonably strives to acquire but the cruelty inherent in taking a man out from poor circumstances and educating him to consider himself beyond them while providing little means for him to truly rise. But that’s what literature, art and cinema do—add nuance and yearning, making reality blander, while offering no solution or true alternative to it. I guess that is what dooms the creative— boredom.

H looked amused, and a rare and precious violence rose within me; being otherwise naturally placid, the sudden surge of emotion felt wonderful. I wanted to hit him, but it was far too crowded. Then I remembered how deeply religious he was—how hypocritical, hell-fearing and insecure. I could give him a subtle ache to remember the evening by.

T: “Don’t you find it odd?”

H: “What?”

T: “The writer of Solaris said that the human imagination is pitifully limited by perception, and the failure of science-fiction lay in that we imagined aliens as extensions of ourselves, individualistic, communicative, mobile and humanoid. It amuses me that most believers view the divine the same way as most stargazers view extraterrestrial life. In the majority of religions, godly attributes are merely human qualities extended to great proportions, deeper but not more meaningful, grander but not more distinct.”

H: “You promised to stop being such an infidel around me.”

I stumblegrabgrunted down the stairs and got into H’s car, a smug smile stretching out the corners of my mouth to painful transparency. As he revved the engine, the philosophical symbolism behind motorised movement struck me.

Some argue the present is the only thing that exists, yesterday was yesterday’s today and tomorrow is tomorrow’s today, but this moment is happening much too quickly to be understood, so we look to the past as a lesson and the future as a beacon, in order to both escape and orient ourselves. Driving, after all, requires us to look out of the windshield and into the rear view mirror but not at our feet pressing the accelerator. Reaching somewhere requires knowledge of where we came from and where we are headed, our current location is mutable, incidental.

They stopped at a signal, and she reached for the pipe again. Her limbs quivered gelatinously, and it took Promethean effort to open her snuffbox without spilling its contents. She finally succeeded, and resting her head on the dashboard, looked toward a nearby bridge. It seemed different, sleeker, made entirely out of steel. They couldn’t have possibly changed the entire structure overnight. We’re supposed to be at Maktoum, aren’t we?

Slapped across the side of a van on her right was an advertisement for ramen in Chinese. On the left, a taxi driver was involved in a heated debate with his veiled client. The horizon was bisected; half the skyline had metamorphosed into a city both alien and oddly familiar.

T: “That black building with the Philips sign, was it there before?”

H: “What?”

T: “I think I’ve been here before. I think I have seen it all before.”

H: “What the hell? You’ve been living here for over twenty years!”

T: “Oh my God, oh my God, its daylight across half the sky… now it’s spreading.”

H: “You’re scaring me. It’s midnight. Where do you think we are?

T: “We are in your car, which is absolutely the same as it was when I got into it, but believe me, outside isn’t Dubai anymore…”

I was twenty, being shuttled around Singapore’s unity monument, as my guide monologued in a voice at once high-pitched and harmonious, her small, pale breasts beckoning from underneath a mousy-brown cardigan. She spoke everything but the truth.

This spoiled-brat of a city, home to a teenage civilisation, having discovered delight, had been swept away with the ebb of misplaced enthusiasm. ‘Premature cultural ejaculation’, Bukowski would have called it. Artists and poets flung themselves against canvases and mikes, and their audience had nothing to offer except for a fickle and irreverent curiosity.

Manicured housewives colonised sidewalks and cafes, progeny frocked and suited in radioactive monotones and attended to in accordance with their birthdates. Here, solitude was impossible without actually being solitary; every decadence was manifest except for the luxury of slowness.

In the malls, at the train stations, people were congealed together and moving at a great pace toward nothing in particular. No one aged—breasts didn’t sag, hair didn’t thin, cheeks never hollowed out. Thousands lived and died having been nothing but beautiful and selfish.

Her slight frame rammed into the cavalcade of aunts, their faces engorged with envy, teeth confettied with fragments of kebab and rocket leaves, eyes half-lidded in postprandial bliss. She was ready to start tearing at the centre of her throat till cartilage and flesh lay in tatters on the marble floor.

It was too much for one day; too many diatribes about decorum, marriage, servants and stilettos, too few smiles directed towards her gout-stricken grandmother in the corner. And the children! There were reams of them spilling into corridors, raucously denuding jasmine trees, and tragically poking fingers into the coal.

She pushed through their mass like a porpoise wielding his awkward torso and pummelling it against the waves. She was going to get away, and fast, from the heat and the intimacy, from the posturing and the vicariousness, from the fear of what she could become.

In a closeted space again, where conversation was impossible and variables limited, she felt safe enough to unbuckle her mind, let loose its bulging luxuriousness, allowed it to drive her off the highway into the labyrinth of Abu Dhabi’s largest industrial area.

Everywhere the grind of trucks and the flushed facades of old warehouses, the longing and surprised glances of labourers held captive by their poverty and her government, the pungent smell of sweat mingled with varnish. This heavily oiled world had rickety joints and a sickness at its heart; it was falling apart in chunks, but would still outlast her.

The vast expanse of desert stretches into the horizon on either side. The road is aflame under the sun’s merciless glare. Arid air flows in through an open window and coats the seats with a thin film of luminescent red dust. The afternoon is dense with the promise of sandstorms and vultures. Occasional shadows of trees sweep across the dashboard.

I see my face mirrored in the silk of my blue gown. My father sits behind the wheel and is characteristically agitated, muttering vague incantations under his breath while fiddling with his prayer beads. Weak and jaundiced, my mother lies propped up on two thin mattresses thrown over the backseat to provide a semblance of comfort; every so often a small groan escapes her lips and is quickly drowned by the hum of wheels turning.

Red nails grab the throat of a pen forcing it to cough and scrape clumsily. The silence is shattered by the ringing of a broken cell phone. It’s the university accountant; she confirms having received the payment in full, and hangs up after a brief statement: “Congratulations dear, you’re going to become a Doctor!”

Slowly, the images that were thus far all-encompassing began to give way to dullness. I felt heavy and numb, became aware of the air-conditioner beating down on me in prickling waves, felt like an infant ejected from a warm womb—surprised and stilled, raw as a paper cut. It had been less than two hours since I drew in my first blue drag.

I couldn’t fathom why my brain was reconstructing, in such brilliant detail, moments that were completely inconsequential. The rational part of me, the empiricist medical professional, started questioning whether the neurotoxins surging through my veins were simply fabricating realities whose existence could neither be conclusively proven nor refuted. I wanted an explanation.

It was then I realised that the recollections were being triggered by purely physical stimuli. When the car moved at a particular speed, and in a direction that was perfectly synchronous with something my body had experienced in a vehicle before, I would be transported. I tried explaining it to H, who looked at me with concern and terror.

T: “Remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?”

H: “What about it?”

T: “Well, I’ve always held the opinion that each time I recall a memory, I change it; because perception and understanding evolve with age, because I am not at this moment who I was at the moment that memory was formed, my reliving it would indefinitely alter what it meant to me. Think of it this way: what up until yesterday were random occurrences, very much forgotten, are now illuminated and unforgettable.”

H: “Maybe you should try remembering something more significant.”

I closed my eyes and thought of my first love’s name, hungrily chanted it like a mantra, desperate to feel the reckless passion I had once trusted myself to possess. Nothing happened. I tried to conjure my first childhood memory, remember something other than my mother’s yellow salwar-kameez, the cracked granite of the verandah, her face partially veiled by the pillowcase she was hanging out to dry, the remainder boldly displaying a large wet eye, and a red palm print across her high Iranian cheekbone, but failed.

T: “It isn’t possible, but I’m glad. I’d be tempted to interfere.”

H: “What do you mean?”

T: “Haven’t you experienced things that you’d rather were erased completely? I wonder if that would be possible, or if the entire exercise would be negated by my remembering that there was something I chose to forget.”

H: “Unless you deleted that too.”

I became silent, overwhelmed by the urge to visit my grandmother’s now derelict garden, climb the sapodilla tree as I used to, before the axes and the worms and the decades of neglect. There was nothing worse than the siren call of the past and its promise of rediscovery; of finely dissecting how you came to become what you are, and seeing your image distilled through the brutally honest perspective of a child.

Later that night, protected from scrutiny and possible incarceration by two locked doors and a hotspot shield, I researched the various aspects of my ‘trip’ with methodical exactness. Google images confirmed my visualisation of Suntec city, old photographs showed me wearing a turquoise jallabiya on orientation day, and my message history contained an exchange asking for directions out of Mussafah.

The smell of rotten apples in my bedroom formed a perfume of primal temptation. I had not eaten them or much else in days. On my desk, novels lay half read, capped pens ran dry, and a handful of wilting frangipanis drew their last breaths in a vase.

In the shower, the warm caress of water, urgent and sighing, cleared up the monkeys in my head. I followed the weak current until it was swallowed by the drain. I sat down to write, and whispered “in memoriam” out loud but softly. My world, once painted in greyscale, had become kaleidoscopic. I felt power surging through my veins. My fingers started to move on paper.

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