http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=11575&date=2016-09-04&pageid=1
Sprightly Spirits!
It isn’t very astonishing that I veered
around to writing about ‘House Spirits’ edited by Palash Krishna Mehrotra. It’s
an anthology of stories, essays and poems from our very precious tosspots and
drinkers of Indian literary coterie - two being personal friends and one a
young travel writer, whose book ‘Following Fish’ (my favourite read), might
have tipped the balance in favour of a concrete wordy piece which appears
before you now. This is a book of hearty gaiety, flavoured and spiced to the
palate of our illustrious writer-drinkers and while I enjoy their narratives
very much, it may be understood that I have no desire other than to be a good
literary compatriot who’s chronicling their jovial doings. Laughter is a
privilege granted to man alone. He has sufficient causes for tears and so,
whenever one chances upon an enterprise which makes one merry, it must not be
lost. With this objective in place, I shall now set to the task at hand.
Spare me your slanders when I say that
certain things must be done to suit the vices of our age. Laughter and vigor comes
to those who are innocent of heart, devoid of a creased brow or an upturned
nose. The comical act accompanies a light drinker, and it is in this context or
a spirit of experimentation and rebellion which sets most drinking in
adolescence. Gautam Bhatia writes, “All
of class 7, section B, had raided the liquor cabinet. I could see Samir’s eyes
slowly mocking me, his mouth turned up at the corners in a leer of contempt.
Before he got a chance to make a remark like, ‘Do you want a straw’, I blocked
my nose with my left hand and took a swig large enough to fill my mouth.”
The stories, poems and essays have three
overlapping pitches: why we drink, the drink games that we play once we get
going and lastly, the downside when the going gets rough with drinks. As
Fitzgerald puts it succinctly, “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a
drink, then the drink takes you.”
The overarching paradigm of the book is to
establish drinking as a mainstay of people in India cutting across all sections
of society. It disrupts the fallacy, ‘India is a non-drinking nation’
propagated by so-called brahaminical Hindu and the devout mullah (the
moralistic middle class tribe), who keep up the hypocricy in their homes but
for whom subterfuge mingles with salacious bacchanalian fun. Palash writes, “For
many Indians, drinking is taboo at home. Which is why the quarter bottle
remains a runaway bestseller. It’s something that can be consumed and
discarded. We drink everywhere-on trains, outside liquor vends, in our cars,
but rarely at home. It’s important to maintain appearances. In Allahabad, my
hometown, people hire cycle rickshaws by the half hour. The rickshaw puller’s
brief is to keep pedaling until the booze runs out.”
The hilarity that Palash sets up in the
introduction, is upheld by Bhaichand Patel. “My most memorable evenings have
been spent drinking feni on Delhi’s rooftops or what we call barsaatis.” He
goes further into detailing the decline of Old Monk (which he says is part of
the Indian heritage and has a possessive following) with the advent of
McDowell’s and now Bacardi. “But it remains a Press Club of India drink than an
Oberoi Hotel drink. Always was.” This is a connoisseur talking – one who loves
his tipple. This celebratory, passionate tone is carried forward by Jairaj
Singh, Sandip Roy, who brands India a whisky nation, and Samanth Subramaniam.
The latter is on a trawl in Kerala belt for ‘toddy shops’- “If you ever find
yourself on one of Kerala’s highways with an hour or five to spare, you should
flag down the first passing male cyclist or pedestrian and say just one word with
a questioning drawl: “Shaaaaaaaap? If it is particularly early in the morning,
throw in a sheepish smile for good measure. You must note here that the drawl
is everything. If you get it right and say ‘Shaaaaaaaap?’-like ‘sharp’ but
without the burr- you will get an animated nod and detailed directions to the
nearest toddy shop.” Samanth’s writing is replete with colorful imagery and
local flavor. He conveys the heat of toddy savors and spiced-up fishy snacks
with right dose of humour and ardour.
Siddharth Chowdhary’s wedges of ‘Tipple
cake’ with raisins soaked in Old Monk and a full bottle of Sula red goes well
with the myth by William Blake - ‘The road to excess leads to the place of
wisdom’. Manohar Shetty vehemently slices through it by the following lines in
his poem ‘The Morning After’ – “You wake to a false dawn/Your throat sandpaper,
/Your tongue curled up /like a dormouse, /Your head/The empty drum/It always
was.” Jeet Thayil weaves language games through his story of drinking games and
Adil Jussuwalla metaphorically warns us about the trickiness of transparent
‘Glass’. Pavan Kumar Jain, Vijay Nambisan
and Manohar Shetty talk in a
confessional mode about‘been there, done
that’ – a warning note to the indulgent fresher, not that the latter will pay any heed to them!
Sumanta Banerjee changes the tone by going
into the history of alcoholism in Calcutta and Soumya Bhattacharya inks a riot
about drinking in prohibited Gujarat. The hypocrisy of the whole state
machinery involved in appearances is upped and ruptured in a searing indictment
by him. On a contrarian note, Sidharth Bhatia paints a canvas of drinking in
Bollywood. Celluloid depictions upkeep the turpitude (drinking is linked to picturization
of villains and fallen men), with just Vicky Donor breaking the norm. Amit Chaudhuri’s
admission that he does not drink is carried to the plane of a transgression –
“The greatest sin is not the sin of having a bad habit, or of high-handedly
deciding which habits are bad and which good, but the transgression of not
joining in.” He further interprets the expressions of his friends – “I feel no
craving for drink. This is seen by people I encounter socially not only to be
inexplicable but suspect. For, to deliberately reject pleasure is sinister. My
stance has left me a bit lonely, and lacking in the experience of the
camaraderie of drunkenness, and its gift of oblivion. But as I hinted earlier,
I’ve known other, more powerful pleasures.”
Paradoxically to Chaudhri’s refrain,
Indrajit Hazra’s ‘Control’ is then a parody on people who say, “I don’t want to
lose control.”’ Indrajit’s playfulness with language heightens this piece to a
wry commentary. “With no drink people are ghosts, vulnerous unsafe. Hollow
pagal these non-alcolis. Some non-alcolis try thicken their tongues with
pretence to sound alcolis but give way. You cannot hide non-alcolis sign. Hee
ha.” That, I would say, is exotically hilarious!
Here are a few lines from the poets of this
anthology: “The cup in my hand/ rattles like a drum/ it tells me my need.” –
Jeet Thayil.
“I asked him once/ Over a peg, boiled eggs/And
a saucer of peanuts/The secret of his long life/And sound health. /He blinked
behind his soda/Water bottle lenses and said/ Drink. Siesta /And God bless; / what
for you is poison/is for me tonic/ And medicine”- Manohar Shetty
“I had of countless bottles made a river/
And discovered its source. Yet one more dropped its love” – Vijay Nambisan
Though the book has been long in coming, it
is finally here (credit goes to Palash).
It emphatically proclaims that India, as
a state, loves drinking, by unmasking the pretentions otherwise; but the
absence of women contributors makes it flip over its contention to truth. The
prevailing reality is that women are choosing hard drinks over mocktails in a bid to exert their equality and right
in patriarchal India. But the book seems to have turned a
blind eye to that fact and has only a couple of women voices.
All
said and done, I will leave you with a new trick I learnt from Henry Derozio’s
essay, ‘On Drunkenness’: – always keep a strawberry at the bottom of your
glass, it has a cooling effect which counteracts the fiery heat of 12 hours of
drinking sin. Ha Ha!
Dear readers, writing this has been unlike
I have done in a long time and it is with great amusement I end here. I hope
you will read the book with the same
lightness and jocularity!
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