‘People had lost faith in me, nobody trusted me anymore’

Kalyan Krishna Y remembers his first drink vividly. “It was a whiskey on October 18, 1998,” he says confidently, with not even so much as a spilt-second tussle with his memory. But then why shouldn’t he remember such a day? After all, it changed his life.

Today the 41-year old is in a rehabilitation centre for alcoholism.
He denies any flirtations with alcohol in his salad days. His teens, and early 20s flipped past him in stark sobriety. It wasn’t until he was 29, married, and an independent entrepreneur that he drank on that fateful October night. “It was the day my wife attempted suicide and I was so stressed that I reached out for a glass,” he recalls.

Family problems perhaps caused him to pick up the bottle, “but my own decisions led to alcoholism” he takes responsibility humbly.
Retracing his relationship with alcohol he narrates the tiresome journey so far. “Since that first drink, I started drinking in the evenings. I moved to Mysore for six months, where perhaps it was easier to drink alone. Back in the city, I would spend my evenings at a bar in Banashankari.” This period was interspersed with a year of almost no drinking when he was staying with his parents in 2001.

“There was no way, I’d let them know that I was drinking every day, so even if I drank, I wouldn’t go back home completely sloshed,” he says.

Was it just a bad phase? When did he know he was morphing into an addict? It’s almost like a gut feeling one has, “You’ll know it yourself, you’ll be the first one to know,” he says philosophically.  “By 2002, I knew of my dependence on alcohol. Though it didn’t affect my work, I drank every evening, religiously.” His nocturnal routines eventually turned diurnal. “By 2006 time didn’t matter. I began drinking in the mornings as well. I also received a notice for divorce from my wife, which I think worsened my condition.”

From then on Kalyan was job-hopping from one company to another. “I left my independent venture and was working in companies. I usually never went to work the first 10 days of the month. If I started drinking, the binge lasted for at least 10 days.

Then a colleague and close friend of mine, John, would persuade me back to work. It was a ritual. In the field that I was in, there’s a database of employees and mine stated that I had a drinking problem. I would get warning notices from the companies.”

Addicts try to hide their problems from others, but the symptoms are pretty hard to miss, “So there’s no point hiding it,” he advises. “People are bound to find out.” Kalyan began to feel inferior and very self conscious. It even affected his finances, health and ‘status’, he says: “I began borrowing money and I would also have bouts of continuous vomiting and stomach aches.”

It was in August 2009, that Kalyan was coaxed into visiting Abhayam, a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addicts in Horamavu, Agara. “I left in 15 days,” he reveals of his first short stint. But in October, he came back. “This time, on my own,” he admits.

It was a month, exactly 11 years since his first drink, when he thought “a lot” and realised how powerless he was against his addiction. “People had lost faith in me, nobody trusted me anymore, and I knew I couldn’t deal with it myself,” he says. 
At the rehabilitation centre, after the first few days of withdrawal,

Kalyan has been determined never to return to the bottle. The first three months were hard, he confesses. Now he makes morning tea for the others at the centre, dabbles in cooking, and walks the dog; reading and discussions with others takes up a major chunk of his time.

According to Kalyan, medical help can only go so far when it comes to addiction, a person needs to have a spiritual and a mental change, he believes. “And no one can force anyone into change. The addict must come to a point where he wants to change,” he says. It’s the point that Kalyan is at. And it’s easy to see it’s where life begins anew.

Contact Abhayam at laly.albert@ gmail.com; 9980591002/9008796974. The centre also has a de-addiction facility for women