Trip Report: My Quest For 'Cutting Chai' After a Night on Acid, MDMA and Viagra

I’d never seen a cat so pretty. It was brown and charging towards the other side of the road with more conviction that anything I’d ever witnessed. At the same time, a loud bang came from the park on my left, perhaps the best connection ever made on a cricket pitch between willow and leather. We continued to saunter through, unperturbed, me and my friend A, in broad 8 am daylight, with stupid smiles raining on our faces.

We’d stepped out for morning chai, which was an adventure for our addled minds. Our acid trip was just about wearing off, after which we’d snorted Ecstasy to delay the crash. My mind was tiring, but my lower body, especially my legs suddenly felt a bolt of thunder, urging me to do something, anything with them. The friend who had arranged the equipment for the night, D, had warned us of this—readily available Ecstasy in Bombay, he said, is 60% MDMA, 30% viagra and 10% crystal meth.

A and I didn’t give a fuck. We are semi-laundas from Delhi, we thought we can handle anything. So we went out to get chai in our boxers. But walking down the street and watching an old uncle sweep away fallen leaves, I felt all of that 30% viagra. A and I looked looked at each other, giggled like pre-teen boys seeing boobs for the first time, and continued to saunter. The sun was shining. I finally knew what everyone meant when they said, “Good morning.”

I don’t remember exactly when a quarter of that acid strip kicked in, but as D had proclaimed, “While blinking, at one point you’ll open your eyes and you’ll just know,” and somewhere around 3 am, I blinked that blink, and Nicola Cruz’s 50-minute Boiler Room set turned into a quest of figuring out faces in his flowing black and white triangle-patterned shirt.

There were three of us at A’s place in Andheri West, a Bombay suburb. A and D had taken their share before I’d come, and were watching a film about Thai prison inmates. It was my first time trying psychedelics, so they went easy on me. My trip went from watching Boiler Room sets, to watching Paradise PD on Netflix, the animated show about white trash cops in America. Between marvelling at how dark the show was in parts, I allegedly spent 45 minutes locking and unlocking D’s new Huawei phone—they change wallpapers every time you hit the power button—and for some reason, the colours in every image bled onto the screen whenever I looked at them. It was quite pretty. Ergo 45 mins of it.

The next morning, our chai walk was actually just a stroll of about 200 metres. But it felt like an eternity. I kept wondering if everyone knew what was going on, looking at A, smiling through our not-secret trip. When we finally sipped our tea, it was piping hot, straight out of the kettle. Suddenly, my entire existence was on fire, and it was a similar experience to one when you’re internally jostling about kissing someone and they’re about an inch and a half away from your face, hands caressing hair. I couldn’t reach a decision, but the Viagra didn’t care. It was all beautiful.

We finished the tea, and decided to take a rickshaw back. The sensory overload had made the walk feel neverending, and I couldn’t really do it again. While rickshaw’ing away though, A and I looked at each other and realised we finally understood what heroes ambling away from explosions in movies felt like.

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