The flight landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi at 0100 hrs and five minutes after touchdown I learned that I would not have the grand welcome that I had hoped for. Instead, I was to get in line and hire a Meru cab to a destination that was an SMS on my phone. Welcome to Delhi. You will find your way around and you will have enough to reason to drink.
The cabbie is a sleepy yet pleasant man and knows well enough to keep conversation to a minimum when ferrying passengers at 1:15 am. I tell him to stop for tea and cigarettes and take a long whiff of the famously noxious Delhi air. There’s really nothing to it. If you come from a city and you travel to another city then there is very little that is different. The cabbie was especially happy when I insisted that I pay for his chai and cigarette. The SMS address takes me to a gated community and it’s a jungle of well tarred roads and big shady trees.
Nobody is home as I walk into the basement apartment. There is ample space to move about and even more to spare. You could easily have a conversation over cocktails in the bathroom. I was asked to make myself at home and wait for another friend to get home. This friend was on his way back from a skiing holiday somewhere in the hills of Auli, Uttarakhand. He was accompanied by a lady friend. She was tan, tiny, had dark eyes and a mane of dark hair which was swept back to reveal a face that any straight man would feel compelled to stare. She moved like royalty, with the smooth, easy confidence of a cat. The friend was all man. He had always been loose-limbed and spread himself over the sofa like a drunken octopus. Extraordinarily fair, his trip to the mountains had given him a blotchy tan and he now had a face that resembled a tomato gone pale with fright. Sleepy and tired, we made painful attempts to stay awake and keep conversation alive. There was a burst of laughter followed by the sounds of drunken stumbling before a group of four stumbled through the door into the hallway. Our host was finally home.
All through the night many more friends slipped into the basement. Not everyone knew everyone else but that didn’t stop us from getting drunk together. As despicable as it may seem to some, alcohol and cigarettes really send your spirits soaring. And then as mysteriously as they had all arrived, they were all gone. The few of us that remained made vows to catch up and exchanged notes on the people we intended to catch up with over the weekend. Somewhere between standing in the lawn somewhere in the back or front or side of the apartment (it is hard to say which is what when you live in a basement) and smoking cigarettes and swatting mosquitoes, it ceased to be wee hours of the night and the slip of lightening sky above reminded us that it was the cusp of dawn. Turning back to the room, there was now just the four of us. We were back to our lazy, travel worn selves and made plans on how best to while away the rest of the day.
The lady friend and I agreed that we were better off not trying to sleep and rather roam around Delhi after a heavy breakfast and wear ourselves a wee bit more to justify an equally gluttonous lunch and return to base to indulge in a well earned nap. The plan was met with great approval, and while one of our number stepped out on an errand, I stepped into the shower. The luxury of the bathroom was such that I spent too long a time in the shower and when I stepped out, I met the lady friend who now appeared immensely exhausted and she asked me if I would be alright if she cancelled on her plan and caught up on some sleep instead. No one refuses royalty. I was no exception to the rule.
The same evening or the next; I am not sure of the chain of events that followed as my train of thought during my stay in Delhi was anything but sober, the lady friend took us out drinking with a friend of hers. A dainty charmer she was. Long hair, long lashes, a broad shy smile and high on confidence, she had long legs as well. Turns out in Delhi, if you are going anywhere worth going you need to call in a day in advance. This is so because, the practice is such that it doesn’t matter even if you don’t end up drinking in places you intend to drink in, you make a reservation- just in case. And so we all sat a table that our hostess procured through some good old fashioned Dilli charm that she had in abundance. We drank a lot, and then some more, all the while making plans about where else to drink. There was some talk of how it was hard to procure any alcohol to take home as it was a dry-day. I didn’t dwell on it as much as the other people with me as I was quite engrossed in the drink that was before me. All the plans that we made fell through and so we headed back to the basement and smoked some more and lounged around the apartment. Then I received a call from the host saying we were to head out to another pub in another part of the city. We had little else to do and nothing else we would rather do, and so we happily took leave of the Lady Friend’s friend. We saw her off of course. We were drunk, sure. But that doesn’t make us mannerless savages. Once at the pub, we drank some more and kept watching out for one another lest one of us should tip over the rooftop railing and fall smack onto the parking area three storeys below us.
Once again the night played out like the night before and before I knew it, I was too tired to stand, too stuffed to care and too drunk to be awake and this being the case, I headed to the big bed and quickly fell asleep. The next morning I missed my flight, stayed back for a few more hours and caught the evening flight out of Delhi and was back in Hyderabad. Drinking in Delhi is pretty much like drinking in any other place. With the right people and the right spirits, there is little else that can go wrong.
_V. 08/05/2017
Righting Writing 