Down and Out in Delhi

Technically, Paharganj is just a street in Old Delhi. But this densely-packed network of alleyways is so much more. On the Main Bazaar you can buy produce, food and furniture; there are cheap hotels, travel agencies, head shops, souvenir stands and Internet cafes that cater to transient travelers.

It is also where you go in India’s capital to score drugs.

For me and my friends, expat kids raised in New Delhi, Paharganj was an early, half-remembered experience. Most parents drag their kids here once (and only once) and my first memory of the place is an uncomfortable one, wet with sweat and whining about the heat. The only reprieve we got that day was when my parents detoured into an unexpected Indian perfume factory - really, the only place in Paharganj worth its salt for the parent-type. It was air-conditioned.

But as I grew older, Paharganj became known in our high school as the place to find hash. By the time we ventured back, we encountered a scene that we who had lived in India for years knew nothing about. New Delhi was a place for drugs? We'd never thought about it like that. It was simply home.

Soon we started going to Paharganj on weekends, carefully planning our excursions - from the way we were dressed (down and dirty, like grimy wanderers) to the strategies we used to fend off hawkers (treat them brusquely, no smiles, no niceties). Upon entering the Main Bazaar, we huddled close together, presenting a unified front to the hawkers chanting their downbeat mantra: "Hashish, opium, brown, white, ketamine, ecstasy, acid." These hawkers, it seemed to me, didn't really want to sell any wares: they were more there to set the tone and invoke the mood. People all around were trying to sell things with far more gusto - jewelers calling out from behind their counters, knickknack vendors determined to peddle a statue of Vishnu - but the drug dealers were like statues, uttering nothing but a stream of narcotic words.

The first time I walked by one of the chanting dealers, it was a shock. This wasn't just a harmless hash run: it was a descent into the seedy underbelly of my home town, a city I thought I'd known. Here, on a whim, we were trying to score hash, but the fact that other, more dangerous substances were on offer ("Did he just say white?... As in heroin?") made the whole place sinister. It became a test of character: how low can you go and still come out? And this was only a few steps in to the bazaar.

As we went further up the street, it became clear which way we were to go. When you come to Nehru Bazaar, which branches off the main drag, to the left you see locals; to the right, foreigners - Japanese with ragged clothes, Israelis in dreadlocks, Americans in native dress: shorts, sneakers and LL Bean backpacks. So we turned right.

My ethnicity is ambiguous (Japanese mother, Irish-German American father) and in the swirl of foreigners, the travel agents and drug dealers would come to me and say "Konnichiwa! Genki desuka?" to which I'd shake my head, only to receive a "Hey, Man! You like India, huh? You need a hotel? Change money?" and in a whisper, "Some hashish?" Invariably I would stay silent, not willing to acknowledge a common language, which sometimes made them go away and other times made them try something else - Russian, German, Italian, Nepali.

We were scared. We were there to buy Drugs and Drugs were Illegal. We must have looked guilty from a mile away. As such, we were easy targets. The dealers (who, almost inevitably, were also travel agents) would saunter up with their pitch and move on. We were usually too scared to accept their offers and on our first few visits, we would spend a couple of hours trying to agree on one hawker, one travel agent, who seemed trustworthy. Eventually we'd pick the nearest one who had already approached us and own up. "We want hashish," we whispered. These arbitrarily chosen guys became our drug dealers.

After several visits, we adopted a routine. We'd pick out a dealer, go into his little travel agency, replete with a map of India and the world, a narrow desk and pictures of clients sitting happily on Kashmiri houseboats, arms around our shady dealer. We'd make some small talk while someone went and fetched the hash, smoke a cigarette or two, and then we'd have it in our hands, our wallets 400 rupees (a little less than $10 at the time) lighter.

Eventually we found a steady dealer, a fat and jovial Kashmiri, and Paharganj adopted us. Roaming dealers didn’t bother us, either because they knew who we were there to see or because we looked like we knew who we were there to see. We started patronizing local restaurants. First, the western-style cafes, serving croissants and sandwiches. Then we started going to the rooftop cafes above the hostels with their bamboo seats, rickety plastic tables, and cheap, good curries. We started getting high on those same rooftops, oblivious to the glances of the staff or disapproving tourists. We weren't tourists and we weren't locals but Paharganj had been conquered, in our minds, and it was just another place in the city we loved.

But Paharganj is a very seedy place and our initial fears were not unfounded. There are missing persons signs pasted on the bulletin boards of almost every hostel - "Last seen at this hostel" many of them read. I remember once entering a dark alleyway at dusk with a dealer and finding myself in a dead end. He said we were to wait for his friend to come and deliver the stuff, and he refused to wait anywhere else. I realized then how absolutely stupid I was. It was a game of testing boundaries and being seedy but I had no real idea what seedy meant. There was actual danger. In the event, nothing happened. I just freaked out and got the hell out of the alley. Afterwards, I rarely went to Paharganj at night. Danger, I believed, was mitigated by daylight. The dirt and shit couldn't harm you if you could see it.

We went to Paharganj to feel the exhilaration of plunging into an abyss and not knowing when you'll hit the ground. No one could touch us, or so we thought. Then a kid in my school got busted. He was a U.S. embassy kid so he had immunity, but the press went nuts and demanded he be prosecuted. He had more than 3 kg of hash on him when he asked a shoemaker to cut hidden compartments into a heavy-soled pair of boots. The shoemaker turned him in and the next thing he knew he was pinned down, being searched by some incensed Indian policemen. The sheer quantity was an offense, but so was the fact that an American teenager had the balls to think he could try to smuggle drugs from Paharganj back to the U.S. It was a problem of attitude.

We all shared it. We were expatriates and our sense of entitlement and immunity colored almost all our actions. Going to Paharganj and smoking drugs was symptomatic of that attitude, in the same way as making your servant get you a glass of water, or even having someone called a servant. We inhabited Paharganj on a lark. It was a myth we could visit for a couple of hours but we would never understand the locals, travel agents and dealers, and we reviled the permanent tourists. It's hard to forget them: there wasn't a single visit to Paharganj that was not peopled with sad foreigners who came for one reason or another and got stuck. They would lie on the street eating a two-rupee plate of daal and rice with the vacant stare of the addict. I used to try and catch their unseeing eyes, looking for some remnant of what they might have been before they tested their limits and found themselves on that decrepit street.

There was never an answer in those eyes and I would be grateful for my parents, my privilege, and my shitty expat attitude because I would always be minutes away from getting in a rickshaw, hash in hand, and going back home.--Sho Spaeth