Rose Tattoo

Rose Tattoo

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

…I ain’t winning no one over I wear it just for you I’ve got your name written here In a rose tattoo…

-The Dropkick Murphys, Rose Tattoo

An incident that changed my life in 2014, when I was 27 years old. I’m 38, now, and it took me 6 years to finally muster the guts to first write about it , which was when it truly hit showed me the impact and toll it had taken on me. Its taken me another 5 years to come out in the open with it.

It’s not meant to be some sermon from the mount preaching or painting myself as some now reformed and righteous soul, but just to demonstrate how non linear life can be — just when you think the bad part’s finished, and you’ve paid for your sins, you realise you’ve been swept away into the churning tides of another wave of disaster. And then you begin to wonder why its only the mishaps and missteps, the unplanned mistakes that people remember, while glossing over all the effort and wins that went in between.

Have you ever felt like people never seem to forget or forgive? No matter how much time has passed, there will always be someone trying dredge up bad memories to make themselves feel good at your own cost, and block you from your journey forward, and make you feel like SHIT?

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve been through this before, or maybe you’re still going through it now. And for everyone who is, let this remind you that you will get through it.

In 2014, I was admitted to pursue my Graduate studies at UC Berkeley School of Law, something I’d only dreamt of until I finally got admitted.I believed it to be my ticket to ride, to forget and put all the4 pain of the past behind me and shoot for the stars and make something of myself.

Reality had different plans, and within a week of landing in Northern California, the sobering hand of reality placed an icy grip on my shoulder, and showed me that this was where the BAD SHIT really began — by welcoming me into a night in handcuffs in Alameda County Jail. As with most interesting things in my life, it began with a kerfuffle at a bar. In this case, I found myself at Thalassa, a bar across the street from my studio apartment on Shattuck Ave., on the back of a long dry spell and looking to settle in. Considering I was alone, the night started off pretty sedately. A few double shots of bourbon, Kansas’s Carry On My Wayward Son blaring through the bar, and a general feeling of fresh-off-the-boat insouciance. But this degenerated rapidly. It was a Saturday night, and the townsfolk were thirsty. Soon, the bar was three deep and it began turning into bit of a tequila circus. Amidst all this raucous hollering and shouting, it became well-nigh impossible to get a drink without pushing, shoving and thrusting your way through the frenzied crowd, who were by this point behaving like crazed Hammerhead sharks at sundown, gone berserk with hunger.

Somewhere in this melee, I became convinced that one of these frothing sea monsters was trying to make away with my debit card, my only debit card, and therefore, my only means of getting my drink on. I was not about to stand by and allow this treachery to pass. I’d learnt better. And as was par for the course then, when someone got between me and my whisky, the Irish in me took over and I promptly decked the chap. I then thought fit to officiously declare to the worried and rather outraged bar staff that I was the victim here. Me, a geeky 150 pound Indian guy completely innocent of anything but a long unquenched and excruciatingly lingering thirst for bourbon, fallen prey to the wiles of an opportunistic and imposturous lush. I thought this would do the trick. But in what was to become a pattern that was to repeat itself many times that night, I was badly off the mark.

My fervent protestations didn’t hit the mark, and instead of evoking sympathy or kindness from the staff and bar-folk, all my talk had only enraged them more. They now considered me an unwanted presence. And when I wouldn’t be persuaded by the bouncers to take my business elsewhere, I tried to press forward the case as a “textbook example of racial profiling” to compel them to back away quietly, they responded with something I truly didn’t expect: they called the fuzz.

But when Johnny Law showed up and tried to take me, I did not go quietly. By then, I already had a head full of Hunter S. Thompson and Christopher Hitchens, and I was at home with the calumny of the Indian police, a force which inspired significantly more dread than anything Northern California could muster, I didn’t think it necessary to treat them with much (or any) deference. I mean, this was Berkeley, not Chicago or L.A., where the fuzz had really given freaks like me reason not just to worry, but to be truly afraid. But not here. To me, Northern California was different. This was the land of Harvey Milk, of The Grateful Dead, the BIRTHPLACE OF FREE SPEECH! To me, this was a vanilla-cinnamon scented paradise of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with the highest quality marijuana and the clouds were sugary beignets waiting be snatched from the sky and dipped into the pelagic flowing chocolate that lapped its sun kissed shores.

Once more, I was proven wrong. And the kind folks of NorCal law enforcement were just waiting to help me understand that true measure of my folly. As is the case with police officers everywhere, their body language gave away the unspoken Universal First Demand: respect and a timorous apology. My response, as it usually is, remained an equally sincere refusal to oblige or comply with any demands, awash in so much contempt it was falling to the floor and staining their shoes. This is where things went awry.

Uptil this point, I figured that they were here only to diffuse the situation and ask me to fuck off from the bar and not give them anymore shit about it, and to get me to go home or something. Wrong again. These vicious pigfuckers I found myself handcuffed and seated in the back of a cruiser and heading to what I thought would be the Berkeley P.D., where all the usual unmanageables are left to ponder their actions for a couple of hours. I began to get suspicious around the time I saw we were leaving the city limits, and I thought it prudent to clear my confusion. One of the cops turned to face me in the backseat, and grinning mirthfully through the mesh, barked, “Berkeley? Ha. No way. You’re not going to Berkeley P.D., tough guy. We’re taking your smart ass to county.” And then, quite sadistically, both of them fell completely silent. Immune to my plaintive entreaties from the backseat of the cruiser, we made our way to the Big House.

I’ve been in a lot of weird places in my life, but let me tell you, there’s something about an organized detention facility that can unnerve even the stoutest of heart. I mean, it’s one thing to be dealing with the police on a street corner or even at the local police station or precinct — that still affords one the belief (even if it does turn out to be completely false) of fair play — you can bargain, bribe, or charm your way out of most things. But when you drive through those electric gates and into that warm razor-wire fenced cocoon and you catch your first sight of a trigger happy machine gun toting guard in a watchtower, your inherent optimism quietly fritters away and gives way to a consuming dread. That’s when you know that you’ve really bought the ticket and taken the ride. All the way past Downtown. Right into the piranha tank. And it left me quite sure that my flesh was going to ripped savagely from my bones in very short order.

Oh Mama, Could This Really Be The End? Stuck Inside of Prison With The Whiskey Blues Again?!

After pulling me out of the cruiser and marching me through some very ominous looking doors and mesh gates, I was shoved to a processing desk, where they gathered my information and possessions (including the laces of my shoes). After this, I was filed into some kind of general holding area to the cheerful welcome of metal doors clanging, inmates’ alternate caterwauling and furious, deranged cussing, and the booming voices of the prison guards, rife with menace, threatening grave consequences to all concerned. This was when The Fear really took hold.

But before I knew it, I was grabbed by my arms, pulled out of the general holding area and wordlessly flung into a windowless cell, and the door slammed shut with a mighty thud. The cell itself looked just like the movies. A steel bed with a tiny rolled up sheet, a toilet bowl and some toilet paper. And the walls were festooned with the cheery and unfiltered ruminations of its previous inhabitants. By this time the booze had worn off, my mouth was as dry as a bone, and a fierce hangover was steadily engulfing my foggy brain. Just about then, I realized to my dismay that not only had I missed a dose of my epilepsy medication owing to the evening’s malarkey, but also that I was dangerously fatigued and sleep deprived from booze and jet lag, and hence, quite liable to be struck down in a fit and collapse into an unconscious, frothing, shuddering heap.

If there’s one thing that frightens me more than prison, it’s an epileptic seizure. Even the thought of one as I type these words out sends shivers down my spine and gets my heart racing. And the prospect of having a seizure in this tiny cell did no good for my already frayed nerves. As if by instinct, I began pounding on the steel door, raving like a man possessed, demanding medical attention, invoking the ACLU and threatening just about every tortious action I could think of. And once again, my action-consequence assessment of the situation proved wrong. Rather than capitulating to my demands, nobody even acknowledged them, and my voice soon melded with the rest of the cacophony.

I suppose the sheer physical exertion of furiously thrashing against the door coupled with what had now turned into a merciless hangover, throbbing headache and all, left me so blinded with exhaustion and pain that I collapsed onto the cold metal bed and passed out. I don’t know how much later it was when I was awoken by the sound of large keys jangling in the rusty lock. The door flung open, and a man with a visage like Sonny Liston brusquely ordered me out of the room. Too startled to even wipe the confusion from my bleary eyes, I shuffled quickly across the cell and out into the corridor where I was trooped into a cage-like holding cell with about eight other guys, where I spend another miserable couple of hours sobering up with a baloney sandwich and a box of orange juice. Towards dawn, when I could see the first ochre rays of sunlight peeking over the horizon, I was handed my meagre possessions, catalogued and carefully preserved in a neat Ziploc bag, and sent on my way with my walking papers and a crisply worded citation to appear in State Court and answer for my sins. Not too bad, all things considered — no illicit beatings, eye gougings or violent shankings. Hell, there weren’t even any sham charges. I had no major bruises, fractures or concussions to speak of. They even had the decency to feed me and spell my name correctly on the paperwork. It could have been much, much worse. Who knows, I could’ve ended up as a bag of compost up in Humboldt County, fertilizing blackberry groves and being urinated on by tobacco chewing thugs and their pure bred Georgia Bloodhounds with names like Bessie and Danger. In fact, writing about this now seems almost voyeurish to me, like I’m a poseur trying to capitalize on an experience that was far less terrifying than I’ve made it sound. Even so, as I took my first free steps as free man, inhaling the cool, fresh dawn Northern California air, and lit my first cigarette of the morning, I knew I was a very lucky man. And despite the huge wave of relief that was surging through my body, I knew I was not in the clear. Not just yet. There was the matter of the court date. As things would have it, the Universe granted me a huge reprieve, and her name was Ms. Deborah Levine, Attorney-at-Law. After meeting with me and my mother (who’d been specially flown down to keep an eye on me), she set our minds at ease by assuring us that we didn’t have anything to worry about. And true to her word, this Angel of Mercy saw to it all charges were dropped by the District Attorney, leaving me in the clear, and in doing so, quite literally making the next year of my life possible. If not for her, well, things would have been very different.

But things weren’t all peaches and cream after that. Far from it. It was a Friday evening. I’d just finished some or the other orientation, the last of a whole week of the stuff, and I could see the sun going down in the distance, and the lights along Bancroft and Telegraph were just beginning to come alive. The revelers would soon be afoot, and they would bring with them all manner of the traditional ‘Welcome Back’ university debauchery. I looked at my watch and it told me it was just past 5:30 p.m. My studio apartment was about a mile south, a mile and a half if I made a detour by People’s Park and scored some weed. Honestly, the prospect of going back home and facing my mother didn’t enthuse me. In fact, it positively crushed me. I saw what this episode had done to her, what I had done to her. The loathing, grief and disgust were so palpable, I felt them like gusts of an icy, stony wind. And of course, this came with the indelible cascade of shame for being my mother.. I felt all of this like an Atlas stone on my back, and this time even my highly sophisticated and practiced levels of callous disregard couldn’t bring me to look away and forgive myself.

So it was that dusk found me sitting alone on a bench on Telegraph Avenue, nervously smoking cigarette and just sighing with exasperation at myself. When I looked around and saw the smiling, cheerful faces around me, brimming with hope and excitement, I realized how abject my own situation was by comparison, and that I was no hero after all. As I sat there wallowing in self pity and pathetically contemplating the shape of things to come, and if indeed, there would be anything to come at all, my phone rang. It was the attorney’s office. Having grown up around lawyers and law offices and then studied law myself, I knew by now that the last calls before the weekend tended to be harbingers only of very good or very bad news. I answered the call, expecting the worst. But to my surprise, the voice at the other end informed me that my case had been resolved without going to trial, and that the charges against me had been dropped. This meant that the kindly Ms. Levine had also refunded me half the fees I’d paid up front, assuming the case went to trial. When the receiver clicked and the call ended, it was almost as if I’d been struck by lightning. I stood there in a state of wide-eyed disbelief, wondering if all this had really happened. When it did sink in a few moments later, I was awash with relief, and then with the cushy legal fees that had been refunded to my account.

Running high on this good news, I felt at once overcome with a deep gratitude and a surge of hopefulness for things to come. Maybe all wasn’t doomed after all. Capitalizing on this miraculous mental and financial windfall, and savouring this surreal sense of relief, I darted across the street to Moe’s, that legendary bookstore, and after a bit of being a kid in candy store and rifling around the collection, I settled on D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace. And as I walked out the store and down the road back home, I felt an indescribable elation. I remember receiving at exactly this time a call from a family friend at home telling me of his recent elephant sightings in the wild, and a promise to send me all the good photos. As I walked down Bancroft, I believed that my drunken debacle and its chaotic consequences had been laid to rest once and for all, and that I had just been granted very, very lucky reprieve. It truly felt like one of those moments you see on TV: where someone’s life changes completely in the blink of an eye. In my case, there were no high falutin’ evangelists, no TV miracles — just good, kind lawyers, and a lot of luck, but the effect was the same — in half an hour, my world had been turned over once more, and my head was in the air again, with my feet slightly hovering only slightly above terra firma (a term I use purposefully, for reasons you’ll see really soon). Indeed, I felt like a new man, absolved of my shame and released back into living.

Alas, this lasted for approximately twelve minutes, the time it took me to bolt home and elatedly convey the news to my mother, and saw in her eyes the first time since she’d arrived, a glimmer of relief. Almost immediately, as if by some sinister twist of fate, I received a message from my uncle that promptly returned my world into an even deeper misery than engulfed it before. This became a leitmotif of abuse that continued for the rest of my stay in California, and it made me swear an oath of retribution that I uphold to this day. For its part, the message informed me in detail of my failings as a human being, and then proceeded to declare that my uncle would henceforth be “assuming charge” of my life and finances, and that I would receive a detailed email enumerating the various well thought out punitive consequences I would soon face to ‘pay’ for my wrongs. I was left to contemplate this overnight.

As promised, they were just warming up. By the next evening, my uncle had devised a detailed plan of character reformation to re-shape me into an acceptable and “normal” human being. For starters, they had to cure me of my various ills. They commenced their project clinically, by “diagnosing” me as afflicted with at least the following: bipolar disorder, sociopathy, social anxiety disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. They even made sure that I visited the University psychiatrist, Dr. Kirsty Panik, M.D., to confirm their diagnosis by telling her that they believed I had these disorders from their observation and analysis of me — essentially tell the physician that I was sick based on what they had observed in their long and elongated interactions with me, which by this point added up to about half a day.

Next, they had to help me transcend material desire. This they accomplished by emptying my bank accounts to zero, and then outlining an expenditure plan that was to accommodate my personal expenditure for the entire year within the amount refunded to me by the angelic Ms. Levine. That amounted to about $2000, which would be dispensed to me as a weekly allowance of $50 over 40 weeks, approximately the duration of two semesters at law school. This princely sum, I was informed, was expected to cover everything from toiletries to food and groceries to any unforeseen miscellaneous expenses. I was sternly cautioned against the dangers of indulging in things like hot chocolate, Netflix, and the occasional croissant as “luxuries that I could ill afford.” This is to say nothing of the “conditions of existence” I was obliged to comply with, which comprised inter alia of reporting at 7 a.m. sharp that I had consumed an Antabuse (Disulfiram tablet), a one paragraph note on what I intended to do for the day, followed by a paragraph of the same after every session at law school, and rounded off by a daily examination of my bank accounts and expenditure over call/videoconference. Of course, every conversation was laced with new and innovative invective, delivered with the tone and intensity of a honey badger caught in a trapper’s iron.

And as if to hedge bets all around and make things watertight, this was swiftly followed by a very shrill warning against trying to go my parents for money or support, because apparently now, I was completely forfeited, in every sense of my being, and in the most degrading sense possible, to the will of this dangerous psychopath and his pack rat common law wife-partner, an obnoxious, pus filled woman with tree trunks for legs, a buzz cut that’s as elegant as her squashed wit, and a sense of direction that would make a red herring blush. Oh, and her feet smell like industrial effluent, and her cooking tastes about the same.

The next phase of their project comprised frequently manic gratuitous lectures reminding me of what an “undeserving cunt” (his words, not mine) I was, and repeatedly emphasizing a “zero tolerance policy,” which if transgressed, would result in me being packed off back home double quick, like some mail order Eastern European prostitute who’s been brought over in a freight container. I’m still making sense of how this could’ve been a credible threat, because it seemed to be one of my uncle’s absolute favourites.

Then there was the problem of my lascivious sense of entitlement and hubris. That was trouble. It had to be stamped out like an errant flaming ember from an extinguished barbecue. Responsibility had to be instilled; gratitude and servitude inculcated. This was accomplished flaying at my sense of self by abusive personal attacks aimed indiscriminately at all facets of my personality, conveyed either by phone calls, impressively worded emails (my uncle is supposed to be a published author, at least but having never seen a copy of his books in a bookstore). Still, unlike me, the socially anxious and awkward, ungrateful alcoholic maniac with Asperger’s syndrome, with a dressing of Bipolar to top it off, he’s a real writer, engaged in writing really serious stuff like chain novels about whales.

What’s more, I found out his real erudition lay in his ability to work in well elocuted lines from Ukridge, crafted daily — individually and innovatively — into scathing attacks on my rectal facilities. And of course, all of this was supplemented by the occasional in-person visit to make sure I really got the message, which had the huge benefit of degrading me in person.

As for my course of study, I guess one could say that went off decently. I graduated with Honours and High Honours in all my courses, won a couple of prestigious awards and graduated near the top of my class. Come graduation day, I took the obligatory photo(s) — all of which, in retrospect, seem to find me exuding relief rather than any sort of happiness or pride in what I’d done. I suppose that by this time, despite the fact that I exceeded expectations and distinguished myself from my peers, I just saw all of this as an exercise in endurance of spirit from which I managed to emerge a stronger person for the adversity.

And yet, when all was said and done, I was trudging slowly back home, graduation certificate in hand, when the last of their denigrating remarks found me — that I should be ashamed of myself for not even having the basic courtesy to thank my uncle and his pack rat wife for “all their support and help, without which I wouldn’t have accomplished a *f*king thing”. Apparently this help and support included the benefit of literally stealing furniture from my apartment while I was at the graduation ceremony — furniture I’d promised to a good friend and neighbour months ahead — and loading it into a truck and leaving before I got home. Apparently, “it didn’t fking matter* who I’d promised it to, because I was an ungrateful and worthless piece of fucking shit.”

On balance however, I view this aspect of my life that year as a sort of penance that I was meant to, because at the end of the day, it taught me a lot. And although it’s taken me years to approach this with any measure of equanimity, and to make my peace with all that happened and my place in all of it, I believe it was part of the journey, that despite its bends and curves, or maybe because of them has brought me to where I am.

What’s truly remarkable, maybe even ironic, however, is the time spent starving on the back steps of my studio apartment craving a $3.50 burger while chain-smoking Pall Malls to suppress this hunger, my famously hilarious ritual of buying toiletries off an aisle that had a statutory cancer warning at the Dollar Store, or purchasing warmer clothes from the Salvation Army in winter, did round off what was otherwise a very special experience. For despite all the setbacks, a great many great things did indeed come of that year, even if I didn’t see it that way just then. Like every penance served, it carried with it an equal benison. Apart from encountering some of the most incredible scholars and mentors on the planet and cultivating some of my most treasured friendships and relationships to this day, I had some truly awesome experiences there. How often can one say that one has delighted in as broad a spectrum as I — which ran from befriending and becoming very good chums with Ross Valory to attending a limited-seats-only speech by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg inside a church, to learning intimately what a Vegan Thanksgiving Feast (it’s not pleasant).

Yet perhaps my most enduring memory will forever be associated with the kindness I was shown by a handful of people who were kind enough to take me for what I was, and celebrate my victories, rather than flog me for my failures, as long gone as they may have been. The kindness of these people has remained in my heart, and is something that I will forever find as inexplicable as I will be forever grateful. The simple act of telling me I deserved a decent bite to eat, or the kindness that underneath inviting me into their home for a Christmas meal and treating me with such warmth and affection, as if I was one of their own, when those who were supposed to be my tribe treated me with the dripping venomous and acerbic derision reserved only for a mass murderer transformed me, and helped me turn all the cruelty and bitterness heaped upon me into compassion, and not become bitter myself, but rather to uplift those who were experiencing cruelty themselves in any way I could. That was truly perhaps the most pivotal turning point in my life, and one shining ray of hope, that despite everything that has been flung at me and brought me to my knees in the interregnum between 2014 and now, that has continued to lead me forward even in the darkest nights, with the possibility of hope.

By the end of it all, I was a much wiser person for the good and more for the bad times — because I hadnt succumbed, but overcame when everyone pegged me to fail.

I rode a horse named Alice through the Yosemite Mountains along the John Muir Trail as a “graduation gift,” in Yosemite National Park on the way back to Southern California, from where I was to return to India. That ride was almost cosmically designed, as if to commemorate my journey — rarely easy, often hard, sometimes dangerous, but always fucking memorable.

Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes it takes longer, the trick is to just keep on going, because your better for the struggle. Don’t ever give up.

And don’t ever lose who you are. Don’t be ashamed of the scars. They’re proof of life.

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