Breakfast Menu

Which is just fine, really, for the end-of-the-month blues, that sorry spell when the credit card is carefully hidden under a pile of laundry, and you venomously jab 8216;No8217; when the ATM offers you a balance print.

Now I love my weekends, but today8217;s a rather different kind of pub crawl8212;for one, it8217;s barely noon, on a Thursday; secondly, the sum total of all my 8216;research8217; expenses will be less than the price of a single mug of lager at the kind of watering holes that play Zeppelin instead of Zee Gold.

8216;8216;Arre, if you are a beginner, it will finish you off,8217;8217; cautions Suresh when I make like the big boys and ask for a quarter. I prudently take a 50 ml measure and a wussy Limca, plonk at a table and sip my Bombay Island Iced Tullee. Most of the customers seem to be on their own, blankly staring at telly histrionics as they practice their liquid surya namaskars. Dusty labourers, red-eyed geezers, night watchmen, taxi drivers8212;the sons of the soil erasing the tonnage of their toil.

I skip the four-second bottoms up these guys seem to have made an art of, and stick to a solo, connoisseur-style appreciation session. Because, contrary to expectations and deplorable associations with illegal hooch, Santra is pretty damn good8212;smooth and clean. In a blindfolded taste test with equivalent potions of Absolut Citron, I suspect I8217;d pick the desi daru three times out of five. No kidding.

In between, I make small talk with a thin, lungi-clad, early-30s man sitting at the same table. 8216;8216;Heard that the Excise Commissioner CS Sangitrao has proposed a 6 am opening time for country bars?8217;8217; I ask him. 8216;8216;Che bajje?8217;8217; Six o8217; clock? he laughs, 8216;8216;Public maarenge jaldi aur.8217;8217; The public will start even earlier I raise my refill to that.

Twenty minutes later, I step out into the bright noon shine, my head doing a gentle backstroke in the Ocean of Buzz. Apollo tells me to find a bed, but Bacchus overrules him. On to Lower Parel and the equally dim, sparse Sooraj Deshi Bar.

I make myself comfy at a table adjacent to Shetty, the garrulous manager. 8216;8216;Lemon flavour? Coffee? Grape?8217;8217; he offers, lining up bottles of GM Distillery8217;s finest. I pick Nimbu Punch, 100 ml, and a small plastic dish of fiery egg burji. Bill amount: Rs 18.

The bar8217;s dozen or so patrons are glued to a scene of Sunny Deol vigorously beating someone up, and then getting beaten up in turn. To match, the three men whose table I8217;m at are slurring about how someone they knew was hit by a havaldar. 8216;8216;People come here to forget their troubles,8217;8217; says Shetty as I top my glass from a plastic water jug, 8216;8216;Wife troubles, child troubles, work troubles8230; I hear them all. Daru is like, what do you call it, anaesthesia for them.8217;8217;

He pauses to dispense a peg to a chap who looks like a clerical worker. In less time than it takes for Shetty to put away the crumpled currency, the man adds water, downs the drink in one pelican-like gulp and is walking out.

8216;8216;Brainwash,8217;8217; laughs the manager.

I ask him if he has trouble with drunks at the bar, feeling like one myself as I gesture for another Bacardi Limon, uh, whatever it was that I had last.

8216;8216;Usually, no,8217;8217; he concedes, 8216;8216;Sometimes people drink and fall asleep, then we put them in the General Ward8212;outside on the pavement, on some newspaper. This is not a boarding, no? But if they make trouble intentionally, then they get the Special Ward8212;some beatings behind the shop.8217;8217; He continues in a gentler voice: 8216;8216;But we try to advise them first, after all, we want them to come back and give us business8230;8221;

By now, I8217;m fairly blotto, but I8217;d like to avoid either ward. So it8217;s time to be off, all charged up for the workday. One souvenir quarter for the road, and somehow payday doesn8217;t seem so far away.