My first alcoholic drink was Old Monk with cola at Calcutta’s iconic Saturday Club. The Summer Carnival was on; I was with friends who were also experiencing their first so-called cocktail. I sipped gingerly through a straw. The rum was barely palpable through the highly sweetened cola. Yet, I don’t remember enjoying the drink. Everybody else on the other hand, seemed to be quite merry. In hindsight, it was perhaps the thrill of tasting something forbidden that was giving them a high.

Liquor and Lipstick

Gitanjali — A few years later, the feisty Moon Moon Sen invited my sister and me to our first real cocktail party. ‘Wear dresses,’ she told us. I have vivid memories of accessorising our clothes with jewellery borrowed from our mother. We got to the Dev Varma apartment on Harrington Street where Riya expertly applied the finishing touches to our makeup ~ a skill that I still haven’t mastered. At the party, we discovered that all the women had dressed down. ‘Nobody wears dresses here,’ I observed. ‘That’s because they don’t know,’ replied Moon Moon, ‘That cocktail parties are all about dressing up.’ Again, I remember the deep-fried shrimps better than the alcohol, but I haven’t forgotten that fashion is an integral part of the cocktail affair.

Moon Moon was ahead of her times but I am glad she offered us this important grain of wisdom. Today, women have finally begun to dress up for cocktail events in India. They flaunt their dresses, accessories and hairdos ~ the whole shebang.

Many cocktail evenings followed my initiation ~ while in JNU, a few of us decided to organise a little party on Valentine’s Day. We girls offered to bartend, JNU was a safe haven where the only risk one ran was to be featured in a pamphlet the following day. Happily, that didn’t happen. My friends and I organised the alcohol and studied a few recipes that we could prepare without much fuss. We didn’t have peg measures, so we improvised with test tubes pinched from the Life Sciences lab. And we did fix some mean cocktails. Towards the end of the evening, when we ran out of mixes, we served shots. How cool was that? By the time I finished with university, I had acquired the skills to prepare a few good cocktails. I also developed a taste for Gin and Tonic ~ with freshly squeezed lime (see page 74) and the Long Island Tea.

In the course of my travels ~ first as a wide-eyed youngster and now as a woman of the world (I hope) ~ I have raised a glass in the strangest, often surreal situations. In coastal Tuticorin, more famous for its pearls than alcohol, I shared Golconda sherry with a few Catholic priests who strummed one gospel after another. A friend once took me to a rather swish bar in Ashgabat where one had vodka under the watchful eyes of the KGB. Several stories below, the Turkmen capital twinkled back at us in its energy-abundant splendour. In Nuwara Eliya, in up-country Sri Lanka, the bartender used a limited selection of alcohol with an equally small number of mixes ~ coconut water, watermelon juice or pineapple juice. He dressed these cocktails with little paper umbrellas fashioned out of toothpicks. That was all that the bar could offer, apart from cricket. While trekking in lower Mustang, I’ve had hot buttered rum with a magnificent view of the Annapoorna range. In the Helambu region, also in Nepal, we were invited to share a rather foul raksi with the proprietor of the lodge where we were staying. At a ballet in Moscow, I was forced to drain a rather large shot of vodka with lightning speed during the interval so as to return to my seat on time. How my throat burned!

My long association with the polio eradication initiative led me, on one occasion, to create a cocktail inspired by the oral polio vaccine. Foremost on my mind was getting the magenta colour right and giving the concoction a somewhat sour taste, quite like the OPV. We mixed vodka with fresh lime water/soda sweet and cranberry juice to obtain the magenta hue. Fresh lime water/soda sweet contributed to the slight tanginess, which worked quite well. The drink was shaken and poured into a chilled cocktail glass and served without garnish. We downed it in two large gulps ~ way more than the two drops prescribed for OPV!

Perhaps my most innovative cocktail experiences were in Afghanistan. The alcohol was rationed severely and we had to improvise. We used whatever we found to fix our drinks. So, if we found Campari, we mixed it with orange juice or any other juice. Sometimes we even used Malibu and pineapple juice to ease the taste of a rather bitter (and somewhat soapy) Campari. There was always lots of fresh juice available ~ pomegranate, watermelon, apple, grape ~ we’d use these liberally with just about anything. And fruits made great garnishes. Since we lived in a community, we often made enormous punches where anything would go. We also made a rather sophisticated punch out of Mojito. If you feel creative (and sufficiently inspired) do try the following recipe that we innovated.

The UNOCA Cocktail

Ingredients

Campari — 30 ml

Malibu — 30 ml

Fresh pineapple juice — 90 ml

Soda — To top

Fresh lime wedges — 2

Fresh strawberries — 3

Mint sprigs — 2 sprigs

Method

Cut the strawberries into quarters and drop in a tall glass filled with ice. Press the mint sprigs and drop into the glass followed by a squeeze of fresh lime wedges. Add the Malibu, Campari and pineapple juice and stir well. Top with soda and serve.

You can vary this with fresh orange juice to fix the traditional Campari Orange, add vodka (instead of Malibu) to tone down the bitterness of the Campari. The other ingredients ~ fresh strawberries, lime wedges and mint ~ work just as well in this variation.

More than anything, it is the company that makes the cocktail experience so memorable. It brings out hidden talent ~ or so we think ~ as people transform into rock stars and divas, or the slightly more melancholic amongst us, into poets and philosophers. You do need a good bartender, however. Each one of us, somewhere, has it in us to be a fairly decent mixologist ~ in the right circumstances.