At the Gates of Heaven

From next year, only five-star hotels would be allowed to have full bars. Every other establishment—all the way down to the no-star, non-A/C dive bar that my father frequented, Apsara—would not have their liquor licenses renewed. That night he whipped my mother with a nylon clothesline. That was August.

My mother cleaned five houses on weekdays and eight on weekends. She told me something was brewing in big vats in the liquor baron Kaimal’s backyard. She did not tell my father this. He stood in line at the BevOrg every night.

A tenth of BevOrgs, the state-owned liquor outlets, would be shut every year, making us “alcohol-free” in a decade. On the news, wives and daughters smiled through tears of relief as they adorned the godsends in the government with pink and yellow flower garlands. My mother was not one of them.

My father had worked in construction before getting priced out by lowly paid migrant workers from the east. Thieves and rapists, he said of them, taking our jobs and screwing our women. These days, he started with a few beers in the morning at Mohini, followed by a long sit-in at the gates of the labor union office with his fellow unemployed. Cheap labor was something even the government could not pass up, so their protests went unheeded. In the evenings, he joined the long but impeccably mannered lines at BevOrg—a curious anomaly in a land where maximum push and volume got you the furthest.

Screaming for dinner right from the front gate, my father staggered down the yard and gave my mother her daily dose of clothesline. Without this daily victory, his abject life would not have been worth living. I stayed out of sight in the backyard until snores from the only bedroom in our house replaced the cracks and whimpers.

I hadn’t always been like this, nor am I a coward like my father. One night when I was fifteen I had waited behind the front door armed with a red-handled sickle. It seemed appropriate to slice through my father’s thin, wiry neck. But my mother seized the sickle from my hand and asked me to leave the room. My future was far too promising, she said. Later that night, as I watched him beat her with his bare hands, I decided a machete would have been the better choice.

Seven years later, here I was awaiting my work visa to Abu Dhabi. I was going to be a cashier at Carrefour. Everyone I knew that went to the Gulf flourished. The ones that stayed back stood in lines at BevOrg. Where would they go in ten years? I would make store manager by then.

One scorching, humid day in March my visa arrived by post. My mother was jubilant. It was as if she had been waiting all her life for this moment. That night she even kept the clothesline folded and ready. But my father did not return. She washed the dishes and folded my clothes, looking out the window every time a vehicle passed by.

The next morning, I woke up to wails. The neighbor’s wife was in my mother’s arms. My father and her husband had been hospitalized after consuming spurious liquor. My mother consoled her friend. We did not cry that day.

The victims of the hooch tragedy were being treated in the overcrowded general ward of the government hospital. In the oppressive heat, the stench of Phenoyl mixed in with the sweat and tears of mourning relatives made me nauseous. I wished I could shove a finger in each ear and shut out the bawling around me. My father was sedated. He had a thick white bandage over his eyes. A nurse set down a wooden cane and a pair of dark glasses next to his bed. He was one of the lucky ones, she said. Twenty-six had died overnight.

The government announced one lakh rupees of compensation for the affected families and disseminated even more warnings about the consumption of alcohol. The liquor lobby blamed the incident on the government’s prohibition. The vats disappeared from Kaimal’s backyard. At home, the beatings stopped.

By April, more than half the bars in the state closed. Others rebranded themselves as family restaurants. On the evening of the third I called for a taxi to go to the airport. My father gripped my arms and felt my face with both hands before resting a palm on the crown of my head as a sign of blessing. He then sat down in the reclining chair where he would spend most of his blind days. My mother saw me off at the airport. She wore her wedding sari for the second time in her life.

When the stewardess asked me if I wanted beer, wine, or one from their fine selection of whiskeys I was reminded of the long line outside a BevOrg we passed on the way to the airport—snaking down the street and across, stopping traffic but still maintaining the unique decorum of Apsaras at the gates of heaven. Being so close to mine, I politely declined.

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