I return
To discover the stranger I have become to myself. In a way that is beyond sadness or mere happiness.
I remembered tonight my first drink.
There are many occasions that qualify for this title. The time I tasted vodka in a story by Alexander Raskin. Or the time I sampled a capful of whisky and ran away from the taste and the guilt. The summer concoctions made at home one vacation when nobody was looking. Yes.
But I remembered another first time, on a train, with two other. boys who had calculated the train stop at Vijayawada, and then run out of the station in the wild hope of finding a booze shop open. They did, and convinced the man in some language other than the Telugu which they did not have to empty a half bottle into their flask along with Citra and they ran all the way back with the impromptu cocktail going jiggle jiggle in their hands while I waited at the door ready to pull the chain for them if they were delayed.
I had never had hard drinks before, I had never been away from home unsupervised with friends. We were going to Calcutta for a quiz. When they passed the flask around, I inhaled first, and then I took a small sip.
It tasted like running, and giddiness, and aftershave, and summer sweatiness, and for some reason this appealed, and so I took one more swig, and then several. Herny, who is not Henry as autocorrect would like us to believe, clucked, and said Gin is a woman's drink. Nobody looked like they gave a fuck, and eventually he too had a swig.
A little later, In Kolkata, we stayed at the Broadway, and there, quite far away from home, as we sat at a window every morning and looked out on to a slowly waking street over breakfast. I remembered looking in at Koshy's from outside several times while leaving the British Library, and decided that I wanted the opposite view, the inside looking out. it took a visit to Kolkata to compel me to go to Koshy's in an experimental sort of way.
I drank my first beer at Broadway. Some Kalyani type thing. Was underwhelming, as many had warned, but it went down because I was determined to find out. One evening, when we sat there, the kitchen door opened, and an olfactory explosion occurred. The smells of cooking and soya sauce and beer all combined and became the atmosphere of the city for a moment, and I felt a little lurch.
All the things that will eventually kill me were conceived in these moments. The eating, the drinking, the wasting time at restaurants before Bohumil Hrabal made it a respectable literary occupation, all of it.The only thing I will regret is not being less afraid about popping from one to another energetically.
I dwelt on all these, without melancholy, on a nice slow summer trip to Kolkata in early July. I did a bunch of other things. Went with nicer friends, drank fishball soup at Tiretta Bazaar, and ate slow but super breakfast at Mezban one day, and at Flury's another time. Lots of good food, including a lunch-whopper at a student's house, went to a mall and watched some dabba Indiana Jones film. Got wet in the first monsoonal outburst while eating phuchka at New Market, but only after discovering an unexpectedly good bookshop in the vicinity.
I went to Aizawl a little earlier, and that was a different journey. I will write about it this week if I can find the time.