Friday, April 10, 2009

Mumbai freeze-frame: Druggies, on the other hand

4. Druggies, on the other hand

The scene was spitting wild. The security was another thing. You couldn’t believe they actually asked you to show them the contents of your wallet before entering. We did the smart thing - went down to the car after the first set and hit the chew, no problem. Even there the valets were all crowded around, bearing down from every window. It definitely wasn’t the right energy. It didn’t help that the blotter trips we hadn’t manage to score, even at the last minute, were still on our minds.

Samrat was cool… very. I remember the last time he played at the UG, it was maddening. Today, he started off soft, and like, delicate, you know. And then it started. Chicks moving everywhere, guys going crazy in front of the booth and near the bar. There were glasses broken from time to time, but it was like in slow motion coz you couldn’t hear it from the sound. There was this chick in front of me who kept swinging her arms like a groovy gorilla, so much so that I had to keep coordinating my own movements with hers. It wasn’t a bad thing though – the music was very trippy.

The first sign of the cops was at the table – this pig went up to Sammy and had the balls to grab the microphone and say, ‘That’s it, folks. This is a raid, sorry.’ And switched off the sound system mid tempo. Man, we were so pissed. And then, after that, there were like twenty or thirty other pigs in mufti crowded around and everyone was like, ‘What the fu…?’

People were getting lined up all across the aisles – girls and guys separate. There was a commotion in the back of the line, near the bar. We tried to turn around and see, but there was too much crowd. All we managed to catch was this bartender who was standing on the counter and juggling his beer glasses all over the place. There was this pig right in front of him too, screaming his head off, laughing. As the line took us near the lounge section, we saw this other pig - arms and legs spread out all over the couch talking to an old guy who was standing in front of him bent down really low. A waiter was serving the pig coke or something. It was unbelievably hot and the people in the queue ahead and behind started yelling after about twenty minutes – a guy pushed his way up to the front of the line and said something to the pig standing at the door. He got smacked right in the face and was pulled towards the loo by another pig who was hanging around near there. As we reached the front, we saw all these guys with dyed hair who were crying, begging them not to tell their parents about this – ‘Please Sir, please sir…’ Another group was being threatened by a big pig with a camera guy near him. ‘Shut up or we’ll take a photo and publish it in the newspaper,’ he was saying. Straight away five or six guys started posing in front of the camera guy going, ‘Group photo, group photo...’ That was pretty funny. When we got outside, three pigs were checking wallets and pockets again. On the right, a group of female pigs were doing the same to the girls. We didn’t have anything on us when it was our turn, so the pig doing us goes, ‘Address and phone number’, and double-checked what we told him with the driver’s license.

There was a big crowd when we finally got downstairs. Everyone was being herded into the back of these cattle-car-type police vans. We tried to do a last second dodge by bending down low and walking fast away from the janta, but we were spotted immediately by this massive pig who was obviously watching very carefully for just such a situation. When it was our turn to climb the stairs into the van, I thought about letting a punch loose on the pig standing by the door, but then I saw the big lathi and gave up thinking.

No comments:

Post a Comment