So thanks to the dark web and everyones contact in the customs department. Pakistan is catching up with the hippie trend. LSD, shrooms, DMT you name it, youll get it from somewhere.
With the sudden rise to Pakistans up north travels, people have started to throw raves at hunza and other places. If youre missing out on this then theres a story of a boy from Lahore on his LSD trip.
Here it goes
It was July and the year was two thousand and fifteen. My parents were at my brother's abroad and i had the house to myself. The perfect ingredients for any teenager to experiment anything. It was already the best day of my life due to circumstances not relevant however while i was enjoying the best day of my life my best friend Shaban called me or as i call him "shibi".
He wanted to ask me if i was down for acid? Already enjoying the freedom my parents left me with I decided to say no as I didn’t know a single thing about it. To which he politely asked can we trip at your place as we don’t have a place to trip at? I was like yeah sure man, I’m home alone come over whenever you want!
Two hours later.
My phone rings and it says "shibi calling". Shibi tells me
"Salar, Aqil and i are outside". I bring all three in and they get comfortable in my room opening the foil cover the tabs were in. Shocker of the day, they were three and the tabs were four and then they all gave me this look. Now usually when your peers pressure you into doing a drug it’s a smart thing to say no but if you’re like me and you say yes you’re usually bound to become an addict and then ruin your life slowly. However this story is otherwise. Anyway so back in the moment, i just smiled and i was like in my head at that time yeah i should totally do it once at least. So all four of us decided to take the tab. I looked at the tab for a good two minutes contemplating what it could do? I mean it looked so harmless and small. It was the size of my pinky's nail and it had the Hindu God Shiva on it. I was instructed to put it in my mouth and just let the acid ooze out the cardboard tab. The time was 9:00 pm. That was it really, that’s all i was instructed and told to do so i did and i just waited...
Thirty minutes later.
I couldn’t stop laughing! There’s something everyone should know about me, if i go into a laughing fit then its bye bye control and hello laughter. It was exactly like that, i was laughing for no reason but surprisingly enough so were all of my friends. You know if you go to the gym and do abs exercises and you get a very satisfying burn well this was that feeling multiplied by a hundred. The walls started to breathe, like when you lay down on your bed and you can see your stomach slowly going up and down. It was like every man-made object in my room was synchronized breathing with me. This realization of what i got into myself made me questioned my friends on the duration of this feeling. Trust me when you’re on acid this is the worst answer you could hear. "I don’t know" said Salar and then we all went into a laughing fit again.
One hour later
The laughter was hurting my jaw now so i wanted something to munch on. Luckily i had chewing gum lying around in my room because that’s a normal thing to have in your room right? It was the best watermelon flavored chewing gum I’ve ever had in my life. It was like it was the first time i ever really tasted anything. It was like i understood what my body was doing biologically to get me that taste. I took biology as a subject in my olevels. It was all coming back to me that how saliva breaks down starch in the mouth and the esophagus goes into a wave dance to swallow the food and how our taste buds comprehend flavor. Anyhow like all millennial we took our questions to Google and typed in “How long does a LSD trip last?” answers came on the screen in 0.003 seconds which were really hard to focus at. Just by looking at the figure my brain went somewhere else. It totally went to a warehouse in Switzerland where i imagined Google computers working my query and giving me answers in a split of a second. However as the results came in YAHOOanswers was the first pick. Now the thing about YAHOOanswers is that it has the most popular answer on the top not the right one and it said, “FOREVER.”
Sometime later
Time became pointless. I was questioning why do we even measure time in seconds or minutes? Why do we even wear a watch that is a constant reminder that we need to hurry with our life? It all went away in a jiffy as i crossed a picture on the wall while i was walking in my room. A picture of my class when i was in nursery. The date was 1999 August 21st and the picture frame said “*****s first day at school ". You know how they say whatever you see is inverted and your retina processes it into an image and you’re left with like a small picture in your brain somewhere. Well this was quite different!
I was actually physically there standing at the gates of
Learning Alliance previously known as Lahore Preschool. It was actually my first day at school and my mother, a young version of my mother was there to drop a young version of myself. I had my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle schoolbag with my hair very neatly side parted. It was one of my fond childhood memories to get my hair brushed by my mother before I hopped into the school van. She just knew the perfect amount of hair to brush from left to right and she made the neatest parting. Many a times she would be feeding by hand my breakfast. Toasted bread with margarine and an omelet without unions and tomato and many a times the van driver would honk at the gate with my college’s teacher the late sir ****** ******* sitting in the passenger seat often loudly commenting on the fact that my mother still hand feeds me, he was in his late seventies then and had a good relationship with my family since he also taught my father in the Pakistan Military Academy. So! There I am standing in my room in front of a framed picture in my room. That is when I knew this was going to be quite the experience. Once I was out of this visual treat I came back to the part of the room where all the boys were sitting and upon my arrival into their respective sight frames they all looked at me and went like “ CRAZYYYYYYYY KAMAAAAALLLLLL” and that Is when I knew this was going to be quite an experience for all of us. I sat on the edge of my bed and I stared at the direction Shibi was facing, I didn’t know what he was looking at but I wanted to ask him without really making him come out of his zone. I read this somewhere about LSD later that your senses are heightened under the influence of this enlightenment for example you can anticipate a mobile getting a call or a message or you can listen to the dog whistle (they’re all true just by the way). So just as I was turning my neck towards Shibi to ask him where he was in his head, he goes like “Bro do you see the Alps there?” Okay so quick fact my room’s longest wall by width is blue and since I live in the basement and this is Pakistan (pun on bad construction companies), a part of my blue wall has seepage causing the paint to come off a little bit. So Shibi points at the part where the seepage is and he goes like, “There! Do you see it?”. Well to be honest what I’m about to tell you might sound retarded but it was the most out of the world experience you will read in this entire memoir. My body went cold; it got super cold in the room in no time. It was like -20c kind of cold. Luckily I was in my room so I opened my closet and wore a jacket straight front. It wasn’t enough! I was in the Alps wondering how do Indian actresses dance on the Alps peeks in their saris. Now the out of this world part was that my body actually went cold, my nose froze. I was wearing the warmest jacket I had and a tshirt in July and I wasn’t sweating. This was real!
Millennia later
I came out of my bedroom because it was too unreal for me there. I went into the lounge next to my room. The interior was mostly red and brown. All the furniture is wood with a big wooden fire place at the far end of the lounge and the carpet is red with some floral patterns on them. I entered the room with noticing Salar and Aqil sitting on the carpet looking towards the fire place. On my arrival to update me where they were he pointed at this wooden part of the fire place which looked like small scale terrace to a castle on the hill. It went from small scale to real life in a jiffy. It looked like the tower of Saruman from Lords of the Rings. I had just experienced two really good visual getaways and I wasn’t ready for a third one so I suggested let’s eat however the words that came out were somewhat pseudo-intellectual, “I think we should refuel our physical vessels with some nutrition”. Now to the readers who haven’t done LSD this might just sound a notch crazy but in that moment they were the right words to convince my friends to go on a drive.
Thankfully the thing about LSD is that it’s not like you’re drunk or you’re high that you would be walking funny or your eyes will be red. Somebody under the influence of LSD doesn’t look funny or act funny at all, he’s an undetected, walking, tipping, looking normal kind of an individual. So Shibi took the driving seat, we were all comfortable with that and we left my place for a food market nearby. To now have my world travel from my house to God knows where it was, the songs that had my attention. I felt what music was like. There’s a funny feeling you get when you see your crush in your stomach, I could feel that in my ears! It was like I could feel the voice coming out of the singer’s neck, the drums beating to a particular beat, a faded base in the back with a groovy tune and the piano playing at a totally different beat. I wasn’t listening to the song for the first time but at the same time it was like I was listening to a song for the first time.
Upon arrival at the market we couldn’t decide what to eat. A note to be written down if you will be tripping soon, please either have a trip sitter, who sits with you to just decide for you or either be very spontaneous in your decisions. Anyhow we ended up ordering what we would have ordered on any other day, a chicken cheese shawarma each. In real time I’m guessing they came twenty minutes later however it seemed that the waiter just took our order and grabbed them in a minute. This is what I like to call F the time moment. Which stands for Forget the time moment or however your understanding lets you comprehend it. I was pretty excited actually since I had tasted the chewing gum under the influence of the enlightenment so I knew I was in for a treat. Right I was, my first bite of the shawarma was the most oral orgasmic experience ever. It was like a treat for my jaw to munch on and the taste was eclectic. I’ve only experienced those pop tarts powder candy that burst in your mouth when you soak them in your saliva but this was a chicken shawarma bursting in my mouth. Best shawarma I’ve ever had to be honest.
So remember I took biology in my o’levels? Well I was eating how could I not go there? I could feel the energy that the shawarma gave me reach every inch of bones. There’s a character by the name of Silver Surfer in the marvel universe. His energy comes from his flying surfing board into his legs; through his body hence therefore he can burst out a ball of energy through his hand if he wishes to kill you. However at that time I could relate with him because I knew what it felt like to actually feel energy flow through one’s body.
We get home all refueled and decided we take a walk. A wise decision by all of us. When you’re on LSD it’s all happening in the brain so once you’ve eaten your brain has more energy to work. So I guess you know what happened next. The visuals went crazy, every movement of ever leaf was prominent, the grass was greener, and the sky was like a painter’s pallet with only the color blue and all of its shades. It was another out of this world experience. Personally I like to believe I’m an outdoor person, which was just a plus point for I was in an outdoors person paradise. The slow breeze felt like a blanket of cool on my face that was never ending.
As we made our way back into the house we decided to explore the house, because that’s what normal friends do! They explore your house. I went to the roof with a portable speaker; I felt my previous trip to the outdoors was incomplete. I had an urge to go back outside. I laid down on one the solar plates that were adjusted to an angle to receive maximum sunlight in daylight, got my songs on and just looked at the sky. In this moment I pondered over some words my father always keep on telling me. “Stagnant water gets impure, running water stays fresh”. I applied it to my life and to be honest not the first time, my father’s words made a lot of sense to me. At this point of my life I was thinking of applying my study visa for Canada for the fifth time. Yes everyone has problems in life and getting a student visa was mine at the moment. I was the stagnant water in this theory and I had to get up and be the running water. Believe it or not I filled my online student form for the university I’m currently studying at during my first LSD trip.
My visuals were on a low but my brain was on high performance. We all were in my room now talking about this ability to talk to someone and be somewhere else in the back of our heads. I was talking about the partition of Pakistan with everyone while I was thinking about the movie “Jinnah” and how it portrayed Jinnah’s decision for a separate country. To the beats of Nirvana I felt sleepy. Not realizing I’ve been up all night I checked the time for the first time and it was 7:00 am and that my friends was F the time moment number two. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth while my friends banged their heads to “Smells like teen spirit”. I stripped down to my underwear, got cozy in my bed and closed my eyes.
Woke up to the first day of the rest of my life.