So me and a friend of mine, growing increasingly tired of the Bangalore sun and the Bangalore pot decided to make a trip to Kodikanal to trip on some Shrooms.Kodaikanal is a city in the hills of the Dindigul district in the state of Tamil Nadu, India .We left with around 2000 bucks each thinking that it's off season which led to a daunting time towards the end. It was the last month of college and by the time you reach the third year you no longer have the energy to socialize or converse for that matter. In the first year it pays to be a natural suck ass.I had exhausted almost all the money in my account except for the reserve money to cover the bus tariff to the airport which was to happen a few days later. My friend had it all sorted out and quite impulsively we got ourselves two bus tickets to Kodai for the following evening.
The bus ride to kodai was like just any overnight bus ride, by the end of it you want to piss real badly, your grumbling stomach doesn’t help and to top it all, you have an awkward morning wood. After getting down we found a broker who conversed with us in fluent English and drove us to a decent hotel located right at the foot of a miniature hill. A steep flight of stairs began from our location and all the way to the top of the hill. We wasted no time in asking the broker for some shrooms which was the very gist of our journey. Initially he cited deficient rainfall as the reason behind the undersupply of shrooms but when we raised the price, he not only promised to deliver it to our room but also included a gram of the local variety of pot just to sweeten the deal. High altitude pot never disappoints and we were soon on our way around the main city. Kodaikanal, in colonial times was a summer rest house to British officials and American missionaries and the need to educate the growing English-speaking population contributed to the formation of the Kodaikanal International School, a fancy hill station school where once the sons and daughters of British officials gained education. Since independence the only thing that has changed there is that where once the British sat, the Indian elite sits now.
The most striking feature of the main town is the Jamia Mosque minarets that tower over practically everything else in that part of town. The mosque itself is recent and architecturally typical but its presence is immense, the long minarets look over the valley like a gate to Heaven or a silent guardian that is perpetually brooding. The towering presence of the mosque with the distant green hills make for a Euro-Islamic fusion, the kind of which that can be found only in countries like Bosnia and Albania. By 4 in the evening we had our precious commodity but it was a bit different looking than expected, it was clearly old and dried and designed to dupe first time visitors like me and my friend. We consciously fell into it letting desperation make our choices. We were just 2 guys sharing a living room limited by the money in our wallets and the size of our company and I wasn’t going to spend any of it sober if I could help it.
The dried shrooms, if anything, managed to kill our pot high leaving us sober and frustrated. After an hour of aimless walking around the Kodai bus depot we approached a guy who claimed to sell ‘‘1st class’’ shrooms, we took his bloodshot eyes for authenticity. After a few downward alleys, we were lead to a staircase at the end of which stood a wooden shack. Inside the old shack we found a father-son duo, the father gave me the impression that he was ailing. The boy who looked barely 9 or 10 initiated the conversation maybe in a bid to take over his father’s trade eventually. We bought a dozen shrooms at a relatively cheaper price; this batch was fresher and looked closer to the real thing .I grabbed the first bottle of honey from the convenience store and headed straight for our room for the ritual. We chomped down the entire dozen in less than 5 minutes like a bunch of hungry homeless dwarves. In terms of taste, it’s like something between paper and communion bread but the honey made the shrooms surprisingly delicious to eat. It instantly flushed out all the lazy pot high from the afternoon and replaced it with extreme restlessness. It was restlessness coupled with anticipation. It wasn’t just anticipation for the hallucinogen to take hold but for something more than that. “Is the Hotel room big enough?” “Should we go out?” “Should we smoke more pot?” Thoughts started flashing in my head like the news marquee bar at the bottom of the TV screen. We stepped out of our room for the first time after eating shrooms, the sky had turned black but the night was still young.I picked up pace and walked faster to catch up with my mind. We continued making rounds of the town expecting the pop culture inspired symptoms of psychedelics to take control. After a few moments of resting on a rock near the highest point in the town, it suddenly occurred to me that we had been walking for hours and had already made 4 rounds of the hilly little town. Conversations had died out ages ago and my mind was fixated on what seemed like a huge purple cloud hovering over an adjacent hill. It was my moment of clarity. Our experience was far from the desired trip but I loved the moment. I remembered something a friend of mine once told me “to enjoy shrooms you need to be inspired” I wrote it off as ‘corny hippie crap’ back then but now it seemed true, very true. My moment of inspiration came in the form of a purple cloud over a hill, it was brief but it put my mind to rest.I was no longer looking. Overall the shrooms trip was very ambiguous and confusing. Unlike other drugs where the mind is merely a spectator, shrooms allow you to define your own high and I guess that’s where things like inspiration,happiness,sense of achievement etc. play their part.
The next day we were in for a rough journey. We had 400 bucks exact to make it back to Bangalore. We reached the coastal city of Salem by the afternoon after changing 2 Tamil Nadu state buses where we cursed our own foolishness for having invested almost all our money on 2 batches of shrooms. Salem came at the mid of the journey and home was still really far way .So we were in stuck in Salem for a while, depressed, dehydrated and hungry and sleep deprived. My friend's phone was already dead and mine was low on battery, so we decided to take a cab to Bangalore from Salem and then arrange the money somehow once we made our destination. The driver needed 200 bucks for fuel and we had none. Dejected and in despair, we stepped out of the taxi contemplating having to sleep at night on a piece of pavement, also I had a flight to catch the next day. In the heat of the moment, I took my phone, removed the sim card and sold it to the first auto driver i could find for a meagre Rs 300 (was not in a position to bargain).After re-hydrating we caught a Bangalore bound bus immediately just to find out that the Bangalore ticket price had been hiked to 160 bucks and we had had only about 100 bucks left each, which meant we could only travel till Hosur, the last major city in TN before crossing into Karnataka. Hours of travelling on the doorsteps of an Indian state bus can have a dehumanizing effect on any person .First we thought of catching a cab from hosur but as the journey progressed it seemed more and more impractical to do that, it was already 10 in the night and all I could see outside were little cubical houses, agricultural fields and the occasional cross(church).We chatted up a student from kodai returning to Hosur,to attract more sympathy we said we were exchange students from Malaysia. The guy offered to help us catch a cab at hosur.I let out a sigh of relief but our problems weren’t over yet, taxi drivers could still deny us their services on the ground that we had no money whatsoever for advance payment. The Hosur leg of the journey was the longest but it was the best chance we had, a taxi could get us to Bangalore within an hour.I was hoping to redeem our journey by making the final leg less excruciating. Disaster struck again, we couldn’t find a single cab near the bus stop which meant begging the shrewd little conductor to take us back in but then something restored my faith in Humanity, the college kid from Kodai who promised to find us a taxi promptly took out 2 hundred rupee notes and handed it to us. I didn’t know what the hell to say, I wanted to hug the fellow but the bus engine roared back to life and I finished with “God bless you man”. That little show of generosity or rather philanthropy raised our morale; we were going to make it home after all with our dignity intact.
