Something quite unbelievable can be spotted at the southern end of Kolkata's Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, now very much a part of the city. In two modest shopping arcades next to each other there are as many as six off-licence liquor stores. In a stretch of just over three km there are nine such outlets! This is not counting one on a nearby road.
People in Kolkata have traditionally been great tipplers but surely there has to be a limit, and an explanation for the river of grog flowing out of all these wellsprings. A facetious one is that the stuff goes to provide the creative juices for those at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute across the road. A more plausible one is that the number of local gated communities for the well-heeled create an army of imbibers who, come summer or rain (in winter, of course, they simply go overboard or under the table, depending on one's style), bend elbows till they - the elbows, I mean - groan in protest.
This very overt obeisance to Bacchus was not always the case. When I was a youngster, liquor shops in the city, few and far between, kept a deliberately low profile and maintained a positively dowdy exterior. Counters were usually fronted by heavy wire mesh that made those behind them look as if they were permanently incarcerated for their wicked calling. The barrier is mostly still there but now it is a more see-through iron grille.
The dowdy exterior has given way to bright promotional signs for foreign alcohol brands. Before liberalisation brought in the good life I had to journey across many seas to sample a popular brew like Carlsberg; today it and many other brands are there on the shelf in a new rendition of the old quaint classification, IMFL (Indian made foreign liquor).
In the good old days when the store licences were issued under colonial rule, most of the bileti moder dokan were named after their anglicised owners. Hence, you saw the very common "Shaw" (for Saha), or the absolute gem, Bissonauth Law (for Biswanath Laha). Today, it is the other way round - the phoren has Indianised itself, not the least by saying goodbye to flavour and lining up to hike the alcohol content to give more of a kick. Very new beer begins well - light and with flavour - only to become strong and tasteless over time.
These last few summers it has been impossible to find a straightforward honest-to-goodness gin, its flavour to be savoured with no more than a peel of lime and a dash of soda. Instead, what you get is all manner of additionally flavoured atrocities. The villain, of course, is the notion that gin is effete, right only for ladies, when it is its lightness that makes it so palatable in the intense Indian summer.
The other decline in good taste that I cannot get over is the practice I have noticed in club after club, members asking the waiter what is the day's "offer". (Since alcohol cannot be directly advertised, the promotional budget of liquor companies goes into offering discounts at clubs.) My sense is that by the time you have grown up you will have settled on your regular drink; and the sign of a good club is the waiter whom you know well bringing you, without you having to ask for it, "the usual".
My club proudly displays on its emblem that it has been around since "1858" (Bissonauth Law beats it by having been around for "200 years") but many of the good old ways are gone, including the fabulous beefsteaks. The food has been outsourced to caterers - and they, of course, don't have beef on their menu. Those who want to go on a nostalgia trip usually ask some of the old Muslim waiters, who used to double up in the kitchen when food was prepared in-house, to cook at home and bring along some jhal goru (the vernacular for spicy beef, I guess) for you to relive the old times.
I have always felt reassured that alcohol is easily and sensibly imbibed in this part of the country. The first drunk I saw in a public place was in my late 20s on a road in Madras (as it then was), severely under prohibition. And thankfully, this part of the country has very few liquor tragedies. In college it was smart to be able to say that you had tasted bangla but few made a habit of it.
I am all for this democratisation of the hard stuff - witness the mushrooming of liquor shops - that also keeps the state government's tills ringing; but how can we consider ourselves cultivated if in summer you cannot get a decent gin?
subirkroy@gmail.com
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