Tripping Through Time and Uncommon Spaces
From 1998 to 2008, Akshaya Bahibala was lighting up joints, swigging beer and rum, then smoking a few more joints, and so on till “[one] day you look at a calendar by mistake. You realize you have lost a lot of years smoking and rolling, smoking and rolling.” During these various journeys – some physical, others hallucinatory – he met a variety of fellow users. Like a Japanese woman, a British biker, a German in his underwear who scrubbed railway tracks to snag a woman he thought would come that way.
Akshaya’s own encounters with “stuff” started early. As a high-schooler and later in college, he frequented Beach Road in Puri, a place that attracted foreigners and hippies. Folks who seemed enticingly free of social strictures. And more than anything else, blithely happy. Sometimes, he smoked with them. Inspired by their “nothing matters” lifestyle, he dropped out of college and headed to Goa for more bhang, ganja and freedom.
Bahibala dwells on how the addiction slowly built up. With first one joint a day. Then two. Then one tola (10 gms) every week. Then one tola every morning and evening. Till he was often begging for or borrowing money to feed his habit. Even when he thought he should look for a job, he couldn’t drum up the mojo: “It’s easier meeting tourists and getting stoned and doing nothing.” After a while, the trips weren’t giving him the kind of pleasure-inducing highs of the early years. He also started getting gripped by intense paranoia after each trip.
Because of their medicinal properties, “everyone who drinks bhang or smokes ganja claims himself or herself to be a bhang doctor or ganja doctor.” But Akshaya says, during his addiction, he often convinced himself of the medicinal properties of these substances. “I think I did this to justify my addiction. Many others do it for the same reason.”
Recovery wasn’t easy. He was no longer at ease with people, having confined himself to small social groups of fellow-addicts or hippies. Moreover, he started at the bottom of the ladder, earning just 200 Rupees a day at a computer hardware store. Moving onto becoming a bookseller at a bookstore. Till he started his own bookstore with his partner.
The book itself is much more than a black-and-white warning from a recovered addict. It offers a nuanced view of the history of bhang in India (which apparently is legal, unlike ganja and charas). And of the mottled contemporary landscape, with its absurd, hilarious and tragic/comic facets. For instance, about a bhang shop owned by a Brahmin who insists his stuff is purer than what one might get at other shops and even at the government depots.
I also learned, for the first time, about opium addict cards handed out to folks who can legally procure specified quantities of opium – without which, they might not survive. Or of excise officers being beaten up by infuriated villagers, when their ganja plantations are destroyed. Or of how the intoxicant lures kids too, sometimes as workers who reshape lumps of opium into mini tablets.
What gave me a high was conversing with Akshaya, a refreshing, original thinker who wears many hats: as a poet, bookseller, publisher and founder of Walking Bookfairs. The following are snippets from our conversation:
On his personal journey, before writing Bhang Journeys
I quit my studies when I was in graduation at the age of 19 and started working in small places like hotels and restaurants. There was a time when I did nothing, actually. I used to hang out on the street and meet people. I did a few years of work in a restaurant and cafe, in a hotel. I was in Goa for some time. I was in a place called Baleswar in Odisha. I used to work as a receptionist in a small hotel. And in between, also on the Beach Road in Puri for a couple of years, where I did nothing except, you know, meeting foreigners, talking to them, hanging out with them.
As a co-founder of Walking Bookfairs with his partner, Satabdi Mishra.
We started in early 2014. We used to display books on footpaths on the roadside, and we use backpacks to pack books and take them to little schools, neighborhoods where we took out books and displayed them. Then Shatabdi and I got in touch with some of friends and managed to buy this very old minivan, which was used as an ambulance earlier but was now abandoned.
We converted that into a little book truck and drove it around, first around a single district, then around the entire state, covering 30 districts, all the districts of Odisha. Once in 2014 and again in 2015. At the end of 2015, we decided that we wanted a bigger book truck so that we could go around India. Which we then drove across 20 to 21 states covering 10,000 km on that trip. And again in 2018, we did a little tour of India with a smaller book truck, filled only with poetry books, and called it “Poems on the road”.
We started a campaign called Read more Odisha, then Read more India, then Poetry on the Road. We did three Odisha tours, two India tours altogether, covering about 35,000 kms. Idea was to promote books, display books everywhere, talk about books, let people understand that these are also essential things. We’ve been seeing ads with movie stars, promote Coca Cola, Pepsi or Fair and Lovely. We both were like shocked that a society could promote so many things which don’t even matter to us but not promote books.
On the independent bookstores that they run in Odisha
Right now we are not traveling with books anymore. We run two physical bookshops, one in Cuttack, one in Bhubaneshwar. Both the bookstores are independent. We curate our own stock. We don’t focus on the bestsellers or on the frontlist. We do have a some frontlist books, but we focus on the backlist a lot. We work on getting books which are not on display in most bookstores, because these days, most of the bookstores work with the data provided by Nielsen. It is only the best sellers. They only try to keep books which are selling in the market.
We don’t do that. We get books from the backlist because all the publishers do have a very good backlist where there are millions of books which we have never seen. Also, they’re not on display in many of the bookshelves.
We don’t plan to expand. A lot of people keep crying about, you know, the business is not making money and so on. Then they have ten people working for them, which I do not ever understand. When I talk about independent bookshops, I clearly believe that all the independent bookshops should be run by two to three people and they should be the owners, they should be the bosses, they should be the manpower behind it. They should be doing everything except, you know, hiring 20 people and running a little corporation. I don’t consider that an independent bookshop.
On how the nation can foster a reading culture with independent bookstores
Instead of opening new bookshops where we hire people, why don’t we create the opportunity for young people to open their little small bookshop, one bookshop which can open for 6 hours a day and make 30 to 40,000 Rupees. In a city like Bangalore, we can have hundreds of these small ones, instead of creating a big module where the overhead costs are high and people are not getting paid well. I think the smaller size is the answer. And run by individuals.
I completely believe that bookstores are the only way to promote books, no matter what. There are influencers who got 30,000 to 40,000 followers. Then why do they want their books to be displayed in bookstores? Because that’s where readers come.
And that’s why I have not shared a single time in last two, three months about any online platform where my book is available. I only promote bookstores. I don’t care whether Amazon is selling my book or not. If they pay me also, I’m not going to say yes, but if you have a small bookstore, I would love to go and, you know, spend time and visit.
Tell me, is there a poetry bookshop in India? No. Why not? Every city has 200 new kids trying to be poets. Instead of becoming Instagram poets, or performing poetry at a café, all of you can get together, invest Rupees 2000 each and have a little place to create a bookstore.
References
Akshaya Bahibala, Bhang Journeys: Stories, Histories, Trips and Travels, Speaking Tiger, 2024