People We Meet: Ranjit Brar’s ‘horrible’ road led him back to San Francisco

“Imagine this, right? There’s a fork in the road where down one road is like — how would I explain this,” Ranjit Brar muses for a moment. “Dead trees. You see rocks, or a road that’s potholes. It’s just horrible.” 

The other road in the scenario looks beautiful, Brar says, but seemed “so far-fetched” that for years, he didn’t choose it. 

Instead, he found himself selling drugs, stealing cars, committing identity theft, anything — just to buy more heroin or pay for a place to sleep at night. He’d catch charges, post bail, skip town to the next county. 

“It’s easier to stay in something that feels more secure, even though it’s a miserable life,” Brar says. Today, he sits at a conference table, with his work ID and key fob hanging off a lanyard around his neck, his goatee neatly trimmed. A tattoo on his throat peeps over the top of his T-shirt.

One fork in the road came 12 years ago, when Brar found himself 32 years old and addicted to painkillers after a shooting at his home in Florida left him severely injured. He told a Daytona Beach news outlet in an interview at the time about his pain and the various medications he was taking to ease it. 

Eventually, his doctors cut him off the pills, and he found his way to heroin. Before he knew it, his family was in shambles. 

Feeling “empty inside,” Brar left behind his children and relationship and hit the road back to the Bay Area. “San Francisco, it’s the best place if you want to change your life around,” Brar says. “And it’s the worst place if you want to destroy your life.” 

Brar had spent his early years here, and his adoptive father still lived in the area. 

“I came back to California … to reconcile [with] my father, try to see if I could salvage the relationship,” Brar says. “Any connection to family at this point, that’s what I wanted.” 

When that family connection fell through, Brar continued to find comfort in drugs. As he bounced around the Bay Area, committing petty crime, all roads seemed to lead back to San Francisco, his home base and the city where he was born. 

“I’d come here, Tenderloins. I knew how to survive in the streets, how to sell drugs, the homies are here,” Brar says. “For about ten years, I struggled with trying to get clean. And I couldn’t do it on myself.” 

Brar’s “rock-bottom,” he says, was the day he was arrested and realized he had no one to reach out to. 

The loneliness was jarring. It reminded him of trying to connect with his father, or being shipped off to boarding school in India as a child — an experience he has now learned to see differently. 

“Even though it was a lonely time in my life, everything is something to learn from,” he says. He learned Hindi and Punjabi, and got to travel and see the Himalayas with his grandmother. 

In a similar way, Brar today finds a different kind of solace in the Tenderloin. 

He attended rehab in custody and after he was released, and began volunteering with St. Anthony’s. Brar now works there as a full time volunteer coordinator. He has an apartment nearby and another he shares with his girlfriend. 

As we walk out the door, we run into one of his best friends, with whom he does everything from attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings to going on vacation together. He clarifies that this person is “not a homie, a friend.” 

Brar connects with other people in the throes of addiction and lets them call him if they need support. 

And beyond the neighborhood, his children are grown up and successful, one surfing in Australia, another working as an electrician in Florida, and a third attending college in New York. 

Brar, though, still finds his comfort in San Francisco. Reflecting, he says that rehabilitating in the same place where he used drugs has only made his recovery stronger. “It keeps me grounded.”