It all began when three years ago, Pankaj told his parents that he didn't want to study further. "It's a waste of time for me," he pleaded, "I know I'll fail again "" so why should I go everyday?" |
His father was quite open to the idea, though Mukti wasn't. "I asked him what he'd do if he didn't go to school," she said. The father and son duo convinced her that he could get vocational training as a plumber or electrician. And so Pankaj dropped out of school.
"What we didn't realise was that school imposed a certain discipline on his life "" he'd have to wake up early, bathe, eat breakfast and rush to class. Now, he'd sleep till late, go out with his friends...the more we scolded him, the more he withdrew into his own world," said Mukti.
Then, one day, she found him with a dirty handkerchief in his mouth. "His eyes were dopey, he had a vacant smile on his face, and I caught a whiff of pungent glue," she narrated.
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Her husband beat Pankaj long and hard, threatening him with worse if they ever caught him sniffing glue again. He bore the beating stoically. Mukti cried and used emotional blackmail hoping it would work where the blows failed. Her tears failed to move him either.
Unfortunately, since glue is so cheap and easy to obtain, withholding money from Pankaj was no deterrent. "He'd just find cardboard cartons and bottles from the garbage dump to sell... and make enough money for his next fix," she said bitterly. She pleaded with local shopkeepers not to sell glue to him, and they agreed.
"But then he made a lot of unsavoury friends," she said, "you might have seen all those fellows who roam the colony offering to clean your drains?" I nodded and said, "but they're all kids!" They were much older than they looked, Mukti said: "those hankies stuffed in their mouths have stunted their growth!"
She discovered to her horror that these boys also ran a thriving business selling glue. "As a result, all our efforts to keep Pankaj away from glue came to a naught," she said sadly.
One day, she asked him why he did it. "It feels so good that I find it difficult to believe it's bad for me," he said, "the smell goes straight to my head and I see nice dreams..." The boy said that he dreamed in bright colours: "normal life is so drab in comparison," he said, "I can't help but want to go there again and again."
Pankaj retreated further into his technicolour world, even as doctors said he could die of his addiction. "Earlier, he used to help in housework and laugh with us," Mukti said, "now he was constantly sniffing, always trying to escape our eyes."
Eventually, they decided to enrol him in a de-addiction programme. "He'll have to stay there for six months and we're not going to be allowed to even meet him in the interim," she said tearfully, coming to the end of her story.
A long silence ensued. Then she sighed and said, "I wish we'd just never let him drop out of school..."