The queue of unshorn legs and mundus of varying lengths ends in a knot at a BEVCO shop somewhere in Kochi. The quiet order of the daily ritual at the state-owned liquor outlet, undisturbed, except by flies and the occasional sot… When, suddenly, two girls in their early 20s appear out of nowhere. They walk straight to the counter, 10,000 pairs of eyes boring into their backs as they buy bottles of beer and whiskey across the metal grating. If the man at the window is surprised, he doesn’t show it — not even when they hand out exact change or exceed the limit of 4.5 litres per person.
Soon, a Malayalam murmur picks up. Most assume the girls in ‘Western wear’ don’t know the local tongue. But none speaks so loudly as to attract their attention — what if they do know Malayalam; and surely, girls who buy their own liquor are the girls who talk back. Even the drunk, who finds the gutter before he finds his door, mumbles disapprovingly.
For Rose Philip*, four months into her first job with the Kochi bureau of a national daily, this is a familiar drill. So predictable is the sequence of events in fact, that last month, when she went to buy alcohol for a friend who was throwing her bridesmaids a party, Philip was surprised when the auto-driver who drove them home from the liquor shop flew off the handle. Unlike the other men, he didn’t mince words, chiding them severely for setting a bad example and sullying the community’s name. Nothing she and her friends hadn’t heard before (“At least he spared us the usual Vodka-is-bad-for-your-ovaries rant”). But Philip, who went to college in Bengaluru, says he did bring to mind another, very different man. An auto-driver who, back in the garden city, offered to buy his retching passengers — after a particularly raucous ladies night at the bar — a bottle of water.
This was also the night when Philip had stubbed a cigarette barefoot — “I could have sworn I had my shoes on” — and her friend had mixed enough drinks to dance on broken glass. But not every night is a wild night. Certainly not in Kochi, where those who shun the four-star bars, because “you can’t really chill there”, invariably wind up in the purple haze of the Glow, a dive bar where strange men may or may not offer to buy you a drink, but will promptly pull up a chair before they can make good on their promises.
Unlike most girls and boys her age, who drink to get drunk, Philip savours her bourbons and single malts, and shuns the “girly” gins and vodkas. A practice that stands her in good stead, when her father — often risking the ire of her mother — offers her a drink in the comfort of their drawing room. That he draws the line at fetching a glass or pouring her a peg at family get-togethers is a different matter, of course.
Since her first taste of rebellion in a glass was also ‘in-house’ — she was 17, when her cousin brought back a Jack Daniel’s with him from Dubai — Philip would rather drink at home in Kochi. Something, 22-year-old Priyanka Arya would never do.
Growing up in Noida, her parents knew Arya was drinking in college at Delhi University, but their disapproval (or approval?) was always tacit. Now a student of film and television production at the Xavier Institute of Communication in sleepy, provincial Ranchi, Arya is careful still not to alarm the owners of her paying guest accommodation by drinking at ‘home’. Her venue of choice to take a potent swig is ‘Pantaloons’, or more accurately, the Eastern Mall.
Using that old trick in the bag, of pouring colourless vodka into half-empty bottles of Sprite, Arya and her friends spend many wintry evenings glugging not-so-soft drinks and eating Maggi. Not a heavy or habitual drinker, Arya says she’d rather have fresh juice than alcohol on most days. “But since pomegranate juice costs ₹100 and a nip of vodka ₹90, I don’t always hold out,” she says.
Theka errands, though, are inevitably run by the boys in class, notwithstanding access — there are at least three wine and liquor shops near the institute, the closest of which is barely 300m from its gates. “But how hard can it be?” asks Arya, with a confidence as heady as her age, nattering away about the time when she bought local ‘hooch’ or hariya in plastic glasses from tribal women outside (where else, but) ‘Pantaloons’. Made of fermented rice, she says it tasted like chhach or buttermilk, and hardly gave her a buzz. Yet it wasn’t half as vile as the feni her roommate’s boyfriend carted back from Goa, she claims. Arya is now hoping to better her hariya experience with a sip of sweet-smelling, pungent mahua, a drink made with flowers, before she leaves for Mumbai next Spring. By which time, back at the BEVCO in Kochi, a man at the counter or in the queue may have offered to buy ‘the girls in Western wear’, a drink or two at Glow.
(*Name changed on request)