Pants Down

Thinking of Toto’s Garage, Shikhar thought, “I’ve got a plan”.

He and his friends from a well-regarded B-school were doing their summer internship and had gotten their first salary. Like most people who, like them, had just gotten their first salaries, they decided to get drunk. Or more specifically, Shikhar wanted to get very drunk and the rest wanted to have a good time.

Summer saw Shikhar and his friends disperse to the various economic hubs of India for their summer internships. But most headed for Mumbai.

Shikhar was doing his internship at a stuffy bank. He was in Mumbai.

Rohit was working on a project to solve world poverty with a consultancy firm. He too was in Mumbai.

Ari was also in Mumbai, helping with a product launch for a marketing firm, though history records no such launch.

For many, this was the first sustained experience of the maximum city of Mumbai. After India's independence, Mumbai became a magnet for commerce, movies, and the mafia. That it was a hot and humid city which was flooded every monsoon was lost to all, who were seduced by its sheer pace and the fecundity of opportunities. Be it the old money from south Mumbai, the glitter of movies in the city's many studios, or the dirty underbelly in Dongri or Bhendi Bazaar, all have flocked to the city's siren call.

Mumbai became Mumbai of the present, not by design but by grabbing the serendipitous opportunities that came her way. Like most of the nooks and corners of the Indian subcontinent, Mumbai, to prove her vintage pedigree, could trace her lineage to the stone age period, as evidenced in some rubble in the northern suburb of Kandivili. For the next many centuries, Mumbai and its neighbourhoods were part of the various kingdoms that ruled western India. Very likely, it would have been consigned to another lonely outpost rather than the throbbing metropolis that it is today. Various Buddhist and Hindu cave temples in and around the city give it a religious hue rather than a trading tone. That said, it was more of a footnote in the larger India story. Mumbai’s seven islands—Isle of Bombay, Parel, Mazagaon, Mahim, Colaba, Worli, and Little Colaba—were referred to, rather unimaginatively, by that Greek trivia collector, Ptolemy, as Heptanesia, or a collection of seven islands. The exposure to Islamic influence came when it was ruled by the Gujrat sultans. They made a pawn sacrifice by giving it to the Portuguese in exchange for protection against the Delhi Sultanate. The Portuguese promptly built some churches to complete the kaleidoscope of all the major religions of the city and started calling the area Bombaim, meaning "Good little bay." In fact, apart from the original Koli fishermen, who still reside in Mumbai, the island cluster was a loose currency that was exchanged between all and sundry till about 1660, when the British too joined the party.

King Charles II of Blighty was a monarch in eventful times. His father lost his head to an executioner, and the grumpy old Oliver Cromwell kicked a young Charles out of his kingship and kingdom. Charles, for the next few years, floated between France, Spain, Portugal, and whoever listened to his weepy story. Luck finally favoured him when Cromwell died alone, as grumpy men often do. The English, tired of all the bickering, called Charles back and installed him on the throne.

Charles, now a king, having experienced the vicissitudes of life, promptly got himself busy with whoring and collecting a delectable bevvy of mistresses. Before his debauchery could plunge the kingdom into the deeper depths of various feminine thighs, the well-wishers of the king realised the urgency to get the king married. And Charles married Catherine of Braganza, of Portugal. He had a competitive bid from a Spanish princess too, but he accepted the Portugal proposal for their better dowry. Charles’ marriage to Catherine brought some stability to the King’s hedonistic ways, but not much, as John Wilmot, one of his courtiers, wrote.

"Restless he rolls from whore to whore

 A merry monarch, scandalous and poor"

The British changed the Portuguese Bombaim’s name (now called Mumbai by the present touchy residents) to Bombay, as it changed hands once again as a part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry to Charles. Apart from the seven islands, he also secured Tangier, in North Africa, trading privileges in Brazil and the East Indies and a small treasure in money. Charles was happier with the other goodies of the dowry; so much so, that in a few years later he leased the islands of Mumbai to a newly formed joint stock company called East India Company for a mere ten pounds. The East India Company was happy with the cheap lease and soon shifted its commercial hub from its factories in Surat to the marshy islands of Mumbai. A currency converter in the British National Archives indicates that ten pounds in the seventeenth century is worth roughly around twelve hundred pounds today. Mumbai’s economy is now more than three hundred billion pounds. If Mumbai got political prominence with British, two other significant events that happened in the next few hundred years, changed Mumbai’s economic fortunes. First was the opening of the Suez Canal, which made Mumbai the commercial gateway to India during the long British rule. Second, in the residual few decades of the last millennium, Kolkata lost its sheen as an economic powerhouse due to labour troubles, communist anarchy, loss of profitable tea gardens and, most importantly, the dilution of political will to grow businesses. This loss of capital from Kolkata directly benefited Mumbai, and Mumbai was firmly entrenched as the prima donna in the economic spectrum of the country’s growth.

Charles, due to his libidinous ways, got Mumbai for the British, and that in turn triggered its ascent. He died without any legitimate heirs but with eleven illegitimate offspring. He never visited Mumbai, but Lady Diana, a direct descendant of one of his bastards, did pay a visit to the maximum city, some three hundred years later. Gossip-mongers say that, like her ancestor, she too was charming and horny.

But all this is moot, as Shikhar and his friends landed up in Mumbai to suckle on its nectar.

In that summer of May 1998, all the harsh realities and the superficial joys of being an intern were under the carpet of the future. All that mattered to Shikhar was that they had received their first stipend and wanted to get drunk.

Mumbaikars take pride in the ceaseless movement of their city. In a country where most things are broken, Mumbai trains run on time and they run for almost all the hours of the day. It is a fact, as much as it is also a fact, that they are packed as sardines. A non-Mumbaikar can hardly ever board the train. It is as if the whole weight of humanity jostles for a foothold in a train compartment.

Indefatigable Shikhar and the band of merry men were hardly deterred by the statistics of Mumbai’s railway operation. They wanted to let their hair down, and railways would be their sturdy steed to their watering hole. Bandra was chosen as the destination as it had maximum rail connectivity to the dispersed group. And in Bandra, the watering hole that was a beacon to all the yet-to-be-rich alcoholics was a pub called Toto’s Garage.

Toto’s Garage was founded in the early 1990s by a cash-rich Punjabi and a cash-savvy Sindhi with the help of a quirky Bengali film art director. As the name indicated, the pub was themed with motor memorabilia. It has brick-lined walls, full of vehicle number plates, with a story that each of these number plates were donated by patrons who had spent many fond hazy nights in Toto’s bosom. It played pulsating bacchanalian rock music and steadfastly refused to toe the line of playing the safe Bollywood music to attract butts to the seats. Drinks were moderately cheap and the food was generally not poisonous. Gourmands died for the Chicken Chilly. And the gourmets would have died on the meatballs with mushroom sauce; but the booze made one’s palate more democratic. For a group, who wanted an easily accessible place that served copious booze with some eats, Toto was indeed a fine choice.

Shikhar arrived first from his digs at Wilson College. With his usual efficiency, he wanted to stock up on some cheap booze before the perhaps more expensive orders were placed for all. Ari and Rohit were staying in a Punjabi chummery in Malad. This shared apartment was run by a sexagenarian ex-serviceman, who was fond of cheap whiskey in the evening but supervised delectable parathas for breakfast.

By the time this motley group was getting into their strides up the alcoholic scale, Shikhar was getting increasingly fidgety. Despite the copious amount of alcohol that he had drunk and the minor buzz in his ears, he was feeling cheated. He had an internal measurement system-DILMIL, or Drunk in Least Milli Litres - and DILMILR which was DILMIL per Rupee. Inspired by his wisdom gathered in Financial Analysis class, he had his parameters based on Operating Ratio and Return on Capital Employed or ROCE. Over the years, with increasing experience, he continued to tweak these metrics and set new benchmarks. Admittedly, "drunkenness" was a subjective metric measured on a decimal scale, but millilitres and rupees spent had enough objective sturdiness to satisfy Shikhar’s rather exacting standards. His alcoholic expenses were generally calculated and projected on these two systems. For example, he avoided beer, as it scored low on DILMIL and haphazard on DILMILR. On the other hand, he preferred Old Monk rum with coke as it had the highest DILMILR but liked Blue Riband Gin with tonic more. He drank it less as the extra money spent on tonic adversely affected the Gin’s DILMILR.

On that day, Shikhar was running out of options as he still had not reached his target level of DILMIL. The tale goes that, as his friends went on in their banter, Shikhar surreptitiously approached the bar-tender. Little did he know that the bar-tender, a silent and moody pod of Dionysus, was not very fond of his clients questioning him. He truly believed that he was doing God’s work by getting the general population high. It was after a good fifteen minutes of Shikhar’s insistent antics to get the attention, that Lobo, the bar-tender, approached him with some menace.

"Brother, I have been drinking that Old Monk for the last couple of hours. Nothing is happening. Sure, you have the right stuff? "

"What the fuck do you mean?" Lobo purred as he placed his 15-inch biceps on the bar shelf with the grace of a cheetah and the charm of an alligator.

"No Man! Do not get me wrong. I am just a student and am forking out my hard-earned cash on the drinks. I am just not getting any kick. Help me out Man." Shikhar countered with all the smoothness that he could muster.

Now, Lobo was a veteran bar-tender in Mumbai, where the shine of coins, the dazzle of cine-stars, and the smoke of guns were common, but even more common were the wannabes of any of these three seductions. Lobo, in the past, had served as a bodyguard to business tycoons, personal aide to a fading superstar of Bollywood, and was on a distant but still first-name basis with some folks in the lanes of Dongri, looked quizzically at Shikhar.

"Fuck off. You are nothing but an Old Monk drinking whiner. "

Till then, no one had dismissed Shikhar with so much petulance. Shikhar swallowed his self-respect, put on his best charm, and pleaded for mercy.

In another twenty minutes, Lobo, became another statistic in the long and continuing list of people who gave Shikhar something that they had initially refused.

"Suresh, get this fucker a SOB," growled Lobo finally, at a demure looking colleague of his, at the back of the bar’s centre island.

Shikhar sat on his bar stool and looked crestfallen.

"SOB? What sir? I had just asked for a stronger drink. "

"Ye, King of Old Monk, chill. Have a SOB - Sandra of Bandra. It is a special shot of a toddy that is brewed locally in the old fishing hamlets of the Kolis. If this does not light your fuse, nothing will. Gulp it down in one swig. "

Shikhar had a SOB and nothing happened. He had another and then some more. By around midnight, Shikhar had enough SOBs that all the Sandras, from Bandra or otherwise, were at serious risk of extinction. He gave a poisonous look at Lobo and then reconciled to being sub-optimally DILMILed with the rest of his friends. 

The group got kicked out of Toto’s Garage at their closing time, and they ambled towards the Bandra train station. Ari and Rohit were to board a fast train in the Central Line. Shikhar had to catch the slow train of the Western Line. He remembered an old limerick and was singing with exact imperfection on top of his voice

"There was a young girl of Baaaandra

Who built an erotic pagooooda;

The walls of its halls

Were festooned with the balls

And the tools of the fools that bestrode her."

Ari wanted to ensure that Shikhar got onto a train, but Rohit stopped him. Considering the song, there was a high risk of all three of them getting thrashed in the Bandra station, so rather him than all of them. Ari did not argue against the solidity of the logic, and they last saw Shikhar tottering in a singularly Brownian motion.

The next morning, Ari and Rohit were woken by the shrill ringing of the phone. It was rather early in the day. The pale morning sun struggled to uplift itself above the hazy tops of the new high rises and the dust of the all-pervasive ongoing construction of malls, roads, and flyovers. Last night's revelry clearly had an impact on both Ari’s and Rohit’s motor skills. To add to their woes, the shrillness of the phone made them even more angry.

"Hello?" asked Rohit through the fog of his brain. "Yes, yes. What? Where? What the fuck? You've got to be kidding me. Now? Are you OK? Some fresh juice? Alright, anything else, master? Yes, of course!" There was a staccato of short questions from Rohit and an increasing irritation in his voice.

After an extended exchange of queries, "Shikhar is a real asshole," Rohit declared with a tone of finality to Ari.

"What happened? Is he all right?" Ari asked with concern.

"Yes, at least I think so. Let us go. We must go to Borivali station to pick him up. I will fill you in on the way. "

And, with that, just as Homer became the bard of the epic, Ari too became the prime story-teller of the incredible tale of Shikhar’s adventures on the night of May 10th, 1998. 

Of course, with every incremental re-telling, the story had a different ornamentation that over time ensured the exact details of the tale got lost in the mists of time. That hardly mattered as the broad contours of Shikhar’s antics, soon became a part of those impossible legends of atomic cloud proportions.

The ironic part of the story was that Shikhar himself remembered very little of the events that transpired that night. There was always an element of circumstantial construction in the whole tale. It was assumed that Shikhar had gotten into a train while singing about the young girl from Bandra. The comfortable clickety-clack of the train and one too many Sandras in his blood stream lulled him into a sleep. Whether he slept or passed out is a matter of minor syntax, but he did not wake up till the early dawn. He found himself completely naked, bar his underpants, ensconced in a cubby hole of a stationary train compartment. The poor lad had gotten into a train, blacked out, and rode the train the whole night long, from one terminus to the other. Sometime during his ride, when the train hardly had any passengers, a thief came to clean him out. He took his wallet, his wrist watch, and his rather cheap sneakers and then would have realised that Shikhar was too stoned to demur even if his clothes were relieved off him. That said, the thief in question had a patch of kindness. With sympathy, the thief had left him two one-rupee coins. In the era before mobile phones, pay phones were the lifelines, and the kind soul had left Shikhar the means to call for help.

By the time Ari and Rohit reached Borivalli station, Shikhar had comfortably overcome the awkwardness of his situation. He had used the other rupee coin to buy a newspaper and a cup of tea from a railway vendor. They discovered him in bench # 3, in platform 2; sitting royally much like the proverbial emperor of the naked folly, in his briefs and reading the newspaper, unfolded, perhaps to hide his modesty. There was a small group of people who also stood in front of him. One could not make out if they were the shocked morality warriors or perverts with hope. Maybe they were just the curious, who were gaping at the newspaper headline—"Buddha Smiles Again. India re-tests its enhanced nuclear capability."

History would remember that May 11th, 1998 would be the day when India would again flex its nuclear muscles after years of slumber and against the opinion of the larger world. The newspaper headline had referenced the code name of the earlier test – Smiling Buddha.

Shikhar, too, would remember the day well. It was the last time he was caught with his pants down, without having sex.