High Risks
“I HAVE A STORY I want to share with you,” popped up a message on Grindr, a gay male dating app. I had recently put out a request soliciting interviews for my research work on HIV and “high fun,” a phenomenon involving sexualised drug use. The message was from a copywriter who works in an advertising agency. When I met him at a café in Mumbai, he spoke for two hours straight.
The copywriter met a man he described as “really handsome and super smart” at a party in 2018 and the two fell into a “fairy-tale romance.” Three months later, they flew to Amsterdam to get married. Back in India, the Supreme Court had just read down Section 377, a colonial-era law criminalising “carnal acts against the order of nature.”
“I always brought my partners home,” the copywriter said, adding that his mother even marched in Calcutta’s Pride Walk on his behalf. “But although my parents adored him, they couldn’t accept the fact I had married a Muslim.”
The husband’s parents, on the other hand, would frequently invite their son’s “friend” over for dinner, but chose to turn a blind eye to the exact nature of their relationship. They were, however, supportive when the copywriter decided to move into the household. Since they had met, the copywriter noticed that his husband seemed to be taking less drugs. His mood improved by leaps and bounds and his weekend-long disappearances had grown infrequent.
The copywriter knew of so-called “chemsex” scenes in places like London and New York: he had read articles describing three-day sex binges fuelled by drugs like GHB and crystal meth. In Mumbai, and on trips to Delhi and Bangalore, he had come across references to high fun or “hf” on Grindr. Having rarely tried anything more potent than a generously poured gin and tonic, he thought the “h” referred to weed.
Whatever it was, high fun was something that happened to other people, he thought. Until he met his husband.
Many of the guys the copywriter’s husband used to meet when he disappeared were high-functioning professionals: doctors and software engineers who had a great time once every alternate month without it seeming to interfere with their careers. Others were young, good-looking boys from working-class backgrounds. Architects mingled with autowallahs, a Bollywood director sucked off a barber. They all had a good time, for the most part.
Unfortunately for the husband, every alternate month turned into every alternate week turned into every alternate day. Often too sick from withdrawal to show up at work, he struggled to hold onto jobs and racked up an astronomical debt. The comedowns were marked by increasingly intense bouts of depression and hallucinations, exacerbating his undiagnosed mental-health issues. His mother complained his character had changed: the cheerful, generous son she raised had become irritable and prone to bursts of crying.
Though he still got high, the husband stopped responding to the invitations that poured into his WhatsApp, Instagram and Grindr inboxes. Or that’s what he told the copywriter anyway.
One Friday evening, a few weeks after their marriage, the copywriter discovered his husband had gone out to meet someone who would give him “stuff” in exchange—it was implicitly understood—for sex. “He felt very guilty,” the copywriter recalled, “so he ordered more drugs. Feeling depressed, I said ‘fine, but give me some too. And let’s call over some guys.’”
The husband administered the injection, using a band to tie the copywriter’s upper arm and a common syringe, stocked in every medical shop. Because it was his first time, the husband gave him just 5 units as measured out by the marks on the insulin syringe. One gram of MDMA contains between 40 to 50 units. The husband gave himself ten and popped some Viagra.
He knew how people in
