Book Excerpt: Bhang Journeys by Akshaya Bahibala

An exclusive excerpt from Bhang Journeys by Akshaya Bahibala (Speaking Tiger, 2026).

The Pilgrim’s Progress

I was in middle school or maybe in high school, around thirteen years old, sometime in 1992-93. A friend and I bunked school and came to Beach Road for the first time. The road was some distance away from our street and no one went there except the hippies. We had seen them from a distance, White bodies, half naked, lying in the sun. It was inevitable that we would go there to take a closer look, my friend and I.

There were two young women sleeping on the beach. They were topless. I remember one of them had very erect nipples pointing towards the sky. It was my first encounter with a woman’s naked body. After that, I kept coming back to the beach as a school kid to meet these ‘foreigners’ and collect postage stamps and coins. I had learned a little English in school, and I managed to talk to them somehow. I realized that some of them spoke an English as bad as mine. I discovered that there are so many other languages in the world. Their languages fascinated me. Their naked bodies fascinated me. I had to keep coming back. It drew me, Beach Road, and I liked being drawn to it. I was a pilgrim.

After I finished school in 1996, I left Puri and the beach and went away to attend college for a few years. But the beach kept calling me. I would come back to Beach Road after my exams and meet people, sit down and talk to people. This is where I learned to smoke and drink.

The hippies were my inspiration. They gave me the strength to quit my graduation halfway and take off on my own; to do what I wanted to do in life; to be free. I did not know then that their world was very different from mine. What would I have done if I had known? I don’t know. I might have buckled down and done what everyone else wanted me to do. Ignorance is sometimes bliss.

And so, in 1999, I ran away to Goa. I had heard about Goa on the beach in Puri. I only needed to get to Goa, I thought, just wander around on the beaches, and freedom would find me. Things didn’t turn out that way. I worked as a receptionist and a waiter in various hotels and restaurants. I didn’t know that the pay would be shit and that you would get treated very badly by your employer and by the guests as well.

I came back to my birth town Puri as if my education was yet to be completed. The beach was my university.

One of the greatest institutions on Beach Road was the Government Bhang Shop. Every foreigner who came to the hippie beach of Puri would visit this institution. It was as if the Government Bhang Shop was a library and you had to go there every day to learn new things and read new stories. Everyone came to the Government Bhang Shop. The tourists, the touts, the louts, the hangabouts, they all came to the Bhang Shop.

So did I.

Welcome to the Government Bhang Shop. You put your hand through a small hole in the shopfront made of crisscrossed wooden planks. You hand over a fifty-rupee note, ask for one tola of ganja. The guy behind the planks wraps it in old newspaper and hands it over to you. If you know the guy well, he will open the little door to the bhang shop and you go and sit with him, have a few chillums, and take your time selecting the best buds and come out happy.

The shop sold bhang—the dry leaves of the cannabis plant—which is legal. It also sold ganja—the dry buds and flowers of the cannabis plant—which is illegal. Bhang is generally had as a drink—as a lassi or thandai—or as a paste rolled into a little ball. Ganja is smoked—in chillums, bidis, cigarettes.

The small police outpost near the Government Bhang Shop never bothers the guy behind the counter who sells illegal ganja. Many police constables have smoked ganja with me on the road, as they’ve done with many others. Some of the constables will complain about not getting good ganja and then happily share what you’ve been smoking and say, ‘I know you always have good stuff on you.’ Sometimes, they even ask you if you’ve got a piece of charas. Now that is hard stuff. I tried that too. But pulled away in time. Some instinct for self-preservation, I suppose.

My thing was ganja.

I started in easy.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher of Bhang Journeys by Akshaya Bahibala (Speaking Tiger, 2026).

About the Book

‘Bhang Journeys illuminates a subculture of drug consumers and cultivators in India. Sincere and gripping, this [is a] genre-bending book … of lesser-known stories that are all powered by cannabis.’—Asian Review of Books

For ten years, from 1998 to 2008, Akshaya Bahibala was in the grip of cannabis—smoking ganja, drinking bhang; living the highs and lows of an addict on Puri’s beaches with hippies, backpackers and drop-outs from West and East. Then he drew back from the edge and tried to make a life, working as a waiter, a salesman, a bookseller.

He starts this unusual book with startling, fragmented memories of his lost decade. From these, he moves to stories about people across Odisha whose lives revolve around bhang, ganja and opium. There is the owner of a government-approved bhang shop who takes pride in selling the purest bhang available and insists it can make people as forgiving as Jesus. The opium-cutter who learned as a young boy how to massage a lump of opium with mustard oil and carve it into little tablets. The girl who survived cholera by licking opium and became a lifelong addict. The ganja farmer who came to the forests of Odisha from Punjab in a helicopter. Excise department men who go to destroy ganja plantations and are beaten up by angry villagers. Interspersed with these stories are official data on opium produced, seized and destroyed; UN reports on the medicinal properties of cannabis; and a veteran’s recipes for bhang laddoos and sharbat.

Full of surprises, this entertaining, often trippy book about India’s most popular intoxicant is both a celebration and a warning.

About the Author

Akshaya Bahibala is a bookseller, poet, publisher and library activist. He is the co-founder of Walking BookFairs, an independent bookstore and publishing house and one of the country’s most popular bookmobiles that has travelled more than 35,000 kilometres across 20 states to spread the love of reading. Akshaya has written four books in Odia. This is his first book in English. When he isn’t travelling across India, he lives in Bhubaneswar with his partner Satabdi and friend Malu and their cats.