Chapter 28: A Brief History of Seher and Single Malt
Seher had always been good at drinking and drinking games. When she was thirteen, she would gather change that was lying all over the house, add it to her pocket money and ask some guy to get her a quarter of vodka from the nearest theka. As the years went by, and her pocket money grew so did her capacity to hold alcohol. By the time she was eighteen, she could be a bottle of whisky down and drive back home safely.
In her first year at college, she decided to switch cars with her mother (without telling her) and drove out of Delhi on the NH8. She stopped at the first police checkpoint she ran into once having lost sight of any kind of gentrification. The secondary requirements for her to stop were the scenic fog and no pakka building in sight. She parked her car a couple of hundred metres away from the police checkpoint, sat on the hood of the car with a bottle of single malt (stolen from her dad’s bar, she had one more in the car), a glass, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes (which she had one more of in the car as well).
Truck drivers slowed down and shouted things at her. A hawaldar walked up to her car to tell her that saahab was calling her to the (makeshift) chowki. She sent a message with the hawaldar inviting the saahab to come have a drink with her instead. Seher had never been afraid of the cops. All her life, the number of laws she had flouted and gotten away with using nothing but sheer charm was crazy. The hawaldar tottered off to pass the message to his saahab. Seher pulled out another whisky glass from her glove box and put it next to the bottle on the hood.
As soon as the saahab showed up, Seher became the perfect lovely-but-outspoken daughter. “Arre, come sit here.” She jumped off the hood of the car. He leaned against it, striking his best young-Amitabh-Bachchan-Filmfare-photoshoot pose. She poured him a drink. The random saahab from the random chowki had never tried single malt in his life. After exactly one large, he looked up in a daze. “Aisa lagryasi, jaise main zameen ke bilkul chaar inch upar hoon, hawa mein.”
By about 2am, there were six cops chilling with Seher, drinking her booze (in the tea glasses they had brought along from the chowki) and talking about their wives and sons and daughters. Three drinks in, she introduced them to a drinking game. “I will name things and if you haven’t done them with your family, you will down the drink. Else you will not, got it?” (Goes without saying that each drink poured wasn’t more than 15 ml.)
One bottle in, one of the hawaldars cried because he had never taken his kids to watch a movie. The very next round: the second one cried because he had never bought his kid a samosa when he took her to a movie. The third one cried because he had hit his wife and kids with his constable’s latth. And so on and so forth.
At 3:30am, the saahab sent three hawaldars to roll the barricades next to Seher’s car, leaving the chowki unmanned for the rest of the night. At sunrise, one of them stumbled his way to the chowki to make chaai. Another washed his face with cold water every fifteen-twenty steps on his way to get parathas from the nearest village.
