Budhha Baba, Turn The Cap

There are four main aspects to a bottle of potable alcohol: closed, open, the outside, and the inside. Of these, the last has two further, critical, sub-aspects: full/still not empty, and empty. Most bottles of booze are completely anonymous, their ‘bottleness’ totally irrelevant to proceedings save one requirement, that the damn thing doesn’t break before it’s been emptied. And then, even among empty bottles of alcohol there are hierarchies. Beer bottles, slimy with warmed condensation, would come at the bottom of the pile. Next would be wine bottles, a few standing out, each marked only by the label that reminds us of the amazing wine they once contained plus, perhaps, the mom­entous occasion and the company in which it was consumed. Hard liquor and liqueur bottles would be at the top of this topply pyramid, simply because they cost the most and (usually) take the longest to consume. Even among these heavy-hitters, very few bottles stand out in the hand, so to speak: there is the triangular feel of Glenfiddich and the generationally different one of Dimple, there is the saloonious ribbing of Southern Comfort, there are the fancy narrownes­ses of grappa and the sensuous wide bottoms of cognacs, but otherwise a daaru ki botull is usually a daaru ki botull.

One of the great exceptions that stands apart from this whole jostling, clinking mass is a bottle that thousands of us Indians can identify with our eyes closed. I don’t know which genius, whether some Dyer or Meakin or some nameless empl­oyee of one of their distilleries, came up with the bottle for Old Monk Rum. As with the Ambassador car, it should be possible to trace which original British or Caribb­ean mould was copied and tweaked to create one of the great iconic Indian product packagings of modern times. There is a special braille that OM worshippers can read blindly, anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night, at any stage of inebriation: finely carved on a squat, square, hollow brick of cheap glass is a tracery of texture, a cobweb of raised glass that’s as familiar and reassuring as the backs of our mothers’ elbows. Above this is a bottleneck, a miniature of a lover’s ripely curved calves. Finally, on top, is a nasty, often rusty, thorny ring-mess of the cap and seal than can only ever belong to a bottle of OM; this is the hurdle all true OM devotees must know how to cross before they are allowed into the kingdom of heavenly bliss. The makers have ‘improved’ it now—foolishly—but the one test we had in the ’80s, to see if a bottle of OM was genuine, was to see whether the cap of a fresh bottle opened with a crisp snap; if it did, the bottle was possibly fake; the real marker of an OM bottle was that the sealing ring would slide with the cap, frustrating unworthy newbies until an initiated veteran took a sharp edge and prised the cap and ring apart; this would invariably lead to some of the coveted brown potion leaking on to fingers and table in a correct and indispensable ablution to the Monk gods.

Learning to drink when too young, one is left with a sloshing vat of embarrassing stories. As a fifteen-year-old from a non-drinking, alcohol-abhorring middle-class family, I could maybe forgive myself, but other school friends, the ones whose fathers had well-stocked (and usually well-locked) bars should have known better. When I first came across a bottle of Old Monk in an illicit quasi-shebeen in a friend’s room in our boarding school, I looked down on it. It looked to my untrained eye like a ‘local’ liqueur. The bottle looked ‘gaudy’ as compared to the ads for scotch, gin etc one had seen in the glossy foreign magazines. Which ganvaar drank rum when you could (or should) be downing double-Patialas of Chivas or Beefeater or, at least, liquid from bottles that tried to copy those great brands? What junior-morons like me didn’t know was that most of our ‘Indian Made Foreign Liquor’, ie whisky, gin, vodka, all the suspects, was based on molasses plus industrial alcohol, with flavouring added. Rum actually being made from molasses meant that Old Monk was the only IMFL that genuinely was what it claimed to be (see box). We callow-youth types found this out soon enough, as we nursed hangovers from the different McRipoffs that had assaulted our livers. Miracul­ously, those who stuck to the cheap “loccul” OM never suffered from heavy heads the next day. Why? Because, despite its lack of looks and pretence, the damn stuff was the purest of the lot. Later in life, I’ve known people to compare those first encounters with OM to meeting a king or a millionaire (or a great sage) in humble disguise.

For many in their college years, Old Monk started as an occasional companion before growing into an indispensable close friend with whom you hung out most days of the week, especially when the weather was anything other than boiling hot. Those with pretensions and funds to back those flummeries may have moved away, turning up their noses (once again) at this ghar ki murgi, but there are lakhs of us who have stayed loyal across our lives, many of us even revelling in the ‘reverse cool’ of the product. For us, a bottle of OM has served, without exaggeration, as a floating signifier: as the perfect revolutionary jhola equivalent of a drink for dedicated jholawalas, conjuring up Cuba, Castro and Che; as a minimalist, unpretentious neat liquor for tough, silent types who eat mountains and jungles for breakfast; as a readily mixable base for creative cocktail-slaves who will add everything and anything to its brown, uncomplaining back—colas, coconut water, Rooh Afza, white wine (advertently or in), other hard alcohol, the gossamer fragrance of sweat from the armpits of small fairies, you name it.

There are limitations, of course, and people argue about them. A lot. Usually over a bottle or three of the “budhha babaji”. For instance, many maintain that OM is not a great drink over and through which to embark on seduction—they claim it creates dark thoughts and affects some joyful bodily functions adversely. On the other hand, OM (and just ice and water) is the perfect potage for mourning a break-up and drowning your sorrows (it boosts dark thoughts while adversely affecting joyous ones). Others insist that political discussions (yes, even right-wing, world-domination ones) are best fuelled by OM, while different conspirators will say you need the scalpel edge of decent vodka to do that properly, that OM makes things too fuzzy and too easily creates siesta-agendas. A hell of a lot of songs and poetry, from great to garbage, have been written with the budhha-sadhu as co-lyricist, but there are some who prefer wine or whisky for the purpose. There are people who say OM has ruined them for all other drinks and they will carry as many bottles as possible on foreign journeys, and then there are people (like me) who are glad for a long break, a viraha which makes the reunion with the beloved, the rum-ani, the ramani, all the more poignantly, deliciously ecstatic.

No matter where you are positioned on these debates, if you’ve been smitten, hooked, entranced by the spiritual pull of the square, dark-brown sage-head, you will know to thank whichever powers you believe, magical, monkish, or just plain earthly distiller’s profit motive, that the bottle, and the inside and outside of it has changed so little over the last decades.

***

The Pure Produce

For Indians suckled on OM, it’s often a shock to drink rum from its original home in the Caribbean. Some of the upper-end, barrel-aged stuff is divine, but there is a lot of industrial rum toing and froing as well. A stra­nge fact I came across is that most Carib­ rum-makers now have to imp­ort mol­a­sses, the local produce fetc­hing too high a price as an export to be ‘wasted’ on making rum. In a twist of irony, India is one of the few nations that makes rum from home-pro­d­uced molasses. So, not only do we have one of the world’s best rums but also environmentally and denominationally one of the purest.