Stoned thrower says he was too high to remember anything

For this 25-year-old, a normal life stopped four years ago when he was introduced to drugs by friends. “I was working in a garage in Gujarat when I started taking charas,” he told Express Newsline on Wednesday night at the Dadar Railway police station. Since then his life has revolved around the daily dose.

Thrown out of the garage when his habits started interfering with his work, he came back to Mumbai, to his family at Kumbharwada in Dharavi. His hopes of a good life dashed, heturned with renewed vigour to the source of his misery. “At times I take it four times a day, it gives me a sense of liveliness,” he said.Along with the sense of liveliness comes despair. “If I had continued to work I could have started my own garage this year, now even my own friends don’t give me work,” he said. In the last one year, he has been reduced to begging for food and money, the Rs 10 which gets him a joint near the tracks at Sion remains his daily obsession.

The only son of parents who do menial jobs to earn their daily bread, Santosh is an unpopular figure at home in Subhash Nagar. After a series of fights with his father Shankar Shinde, he has now given up staying at home. “He used to go around, begging,” said Kamlakar Gorivale, his neighbour.

“He is mad, he was such a good boy before,” said his sister Nirmala Shinde.When informed that he was caught throwing stones at a local the neighbours seemed surprised. They are more used to seeing him sitting in a corner of the dingystone-paved lane, staring into space smoking a beedi. Even when he fought with his family, it never got beyond verbal assault.

Shinde can speak Hindi and Marathi fluently. His academic qualifications (he has studied till 10th) has enriched his vocabulary with a tinkling of English. “My name is Avinash Ram Shinde,” he smiled when first asked to identify himself yesterday.

Only when his mother came to the police station late in the evening did the police find out his real name. “Who would have thought that my mother would come here in search of me?” said Shinde, dismissing his lie as a simple method to escape detection.

Why does he take his joint on the tracks? Because it is only here that he is left alone. And after he takes his dose, he watches, in a daze, as trains carrying commuters rush past him. “Then I get really high, and I don’t know what I do,” he said. The police claim, and he admits, that he throws stones at these trains.

The half-truths that come naturally to Santosh are beinginterpreted as a touch of madness by his family. Medical papers with the Shindes speak of Santosh having had medical treatment for paranoid schizophrenia. But all that doesn’t matter to Santosh as long as he gets his stuff’ every day.