Over time Munu’s alcohol consumption got worse. She explained that “sometimes at a college friend’s birthday or during celebration if any I used to go like this. Come home late. Like that it continued and I got addicted.”
Munu felt powerless over alcohol and it was having a negative effect on her life: “If I would have drunk within my limit, in a manageable way, suppose in a birthday party sometimes like how normal girls drink now-a-days. I didn’t drink like that. Unmanageable life- means my life became unmanageable.” She started to neglect her studies although “somehow managed to pass my HS” and her health got bad: “I became weak because of all these that harmed me more. And I even fell sick in between my HS finals.”
As her curiosity grew, Munu moved from one substance to another: “I stopped doing classes and bunked a lot. There was a field behind the college. I used to go there and have weed.” However, she did not enjoy smoking weed and always returned to alcohol. In college, she met classmates who were also dealing drugs. Two of the girls offered her brown sugar, but she didn’t do it the first time. They said: “’You also take. It’s just a little.’ Means the powder. ‘It’s just a little. Taking a little won’t be a problem but still it’s up to you’.” However, curiosity got the better of her and “Saturday when I came out after my class, I didn’t realize myself that I called that boy, the one who was a peddler.”The impact was very strong and she knew “I won’t be able to take this for many days, or many months, because my body won’t take this.” Indeed, when she got home her physical condition made her family suspicious and her mother found the substance in her pocket.
“I was having tea. There my mother asked ‘What is this?’ So I looked at her and she looked at me. My mother didn’t hit me though. I thought she would slap me once or twice but she didn’t […] My mother asked ‘I gave you a thousand rupees for pocket money. Where is it?’ I said ‘I gave it there’. So my mother sat down and started crying.”