Geetanjali Krishna: That's the spirit!

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

outside a toddy tapper's house in Benaulim, "there's a snake in there." I hastily retreated, as soon as I was able to jump back into my skin.

The toddy tapper's wife Maria laughed when she saw my reaction. Her teenage son and his friends had caught the snake in a paddy field, she said, and incarcerated it in the bucket for fun. "Boys will be boys, you know," she said. I didn't actually, but what I did know was that it would likely scare the bejesus out of some blissfully inebriated Goan if they didn't take the snake out of the bucket soon. It might even turn her customers in the direction of temperance, I commented.

"Maybe it would," Maria said agreeably, "but then, maybe not. It would take a lot more than a baby python to scare a Goan off his booze!"

She was probably right, I thought, looking at people coming in early in the day, quickly settling down with their drinks without even casting a glance at the bucket. "Most of them come everyday," she said, "our feni is cheap at only Rs 35 a litre "" so even the poorer amongst them can afford it!" It is the most popular drink in South Goa, where, according to estimates, there are over 2,200 stills manufacturing coconut feni. Goans are, by and large, gregarious drinkers and consequently toddy tappers (ramponkars in Konkani) do brisk business. Maria and her husband Joseph, like most ramponkars, brew the local liquor inside their home, and I asked if I could see the still.

"First we ferment the palm sap (toddy) in earthenware containers for four days," she explained. This was then distilled by the simple expedient of boiling the toddy in a large pot and allowing the steam to go through a pipe into another pot cooled by water. "To get feni we distil the brew twice," she said. I peered into the container of fresh feni and she asked, "would you like to try some?" I nodded. She dipped her finger into the terracotta pot in which the toddy was stored and offered me a maternal finger to lick.

It tasted good, and even though it wasn't even noon, I asked for a glassful. Good home brewed feni is 30 to 35 per cent proof alcohol, but unlike cashew feni, the coconut version is not as strong smelling. Consequently it went down rather well. While I was tippling, Maria's son Jacob walked in with a container strapped on to his back, after collecting palm sap from the twenty trees they rented. I walked out to see the marvellous ease with which he shimmied up the coconut palm, collected the creamy white sap that had collected in the containers, and shimmied down again after tying an empty pot under the new notches.

Toddy, he said, can be collected year-round, so palm feni is in plentiful supply at all times. Cashew feni, on the other hand, can only be made during the cashew season in late March and early April.

"Extracting the sap is actually good for the tree," said Jacob, "so the owners rent trees to us at Rs 35 a month, we get the toddy, the trees stay healthy and everyone else gets their daily drink!" Most of their older patrons, Maria said, ended up staying the entire day and polishing off a half bottle. "It's probably bad for them to drink so much," she shrugged, "but I can tell you it's great for business!"