Tasting Every Drop of Good Times
Preeta Samarasan returns with Object Permanence 5
You know how a most meaningless object, saved, packed, moved, carried around, and passed down can convey profound things—experience, feeling, memory? We all have a seemingly inexplicable trinket or two, another’s garbage but our treasure. FED’s Object Permanence Series celebrates these unwitting catalysts and their power to transport us across time and space like teleporters and magic flying carpets.
This season, a Cinzano bottle carries us far and wide and personal. Read on for this magnificent traversal of history, culture, and family. Then, look around for your own trinket. What objects transport you? We invite you to share your own magic carpet ride with us in the comments.
Big love, Ashley
Mrs. K.V. Krishnan, 87, retired teacher, Seremban
My oldest brother was the one who introduced us to that drink. Came home with a bottle of it just before Christmas one year, and all sorts of things he had bought from the NAAFI shop too. He used to get all that through his British army kakis. ‘Close personal friends,’ he would call them. They’ll take him to the NAAFI shop and he’ll come back with funny-funny things in tins for us to try. Sheep’s tongue. Corned mutton. Salmon. That Kraft cheese they used to have that will come out in the shape of the tin. And one year, this bottle.
Even looking at the bottle you felt like Wah, we have really come up in life. The men saw that bottle only they put on bow ties and slicked their hair back with extra hair cream. The colour of the glass, the shape of the letters, you just felt like you were in Italy. You could sit there and admire it for twenty minutes before even opening the bottle. Cinzano. Those days we didn’t even know how to pronounce it. Sinzano, Sinzano, we used to say. Only forty-fifty years later my grandchildren heard me say it and started laughing at me, Paati, Paati, it’s Chin-zano. They’ve been to Italy and all that isn’t it, of course lah they will know.
Where we all celebrated Christmas? Perianneh coming with his whole car full of goodies was like a grand joke. Christmas ah, ennathu intha Christmas Christmas ellam, that’s what my parents said, what is all this Christmas-Christmas talk. But they went along with it anyway, for the fun of it. We slaughtered one of our own geese, dug a hole in the ground and put charcoal on top and roasted it, that’s all I remember, I can’t remember the details because it was my father and brothers who were in charge of that. Inside there we put potatoes too. Meantime we opened all those tins one by one, made sandwiches with sliced white bread for a first course, we felt like kings I tell you. Sheep’s tongue! You read the label also you’ll think no thanks, but you won’t believe how delicious it was. Nowadays you cannot find that taste anywhere.
That one bottle of Cinzano must have stretched to fill a dozen glasses, like Jesus with his loaves and fishes. Or like a cross between the water-into-wine and the loaves-and-fishes, haha! Of course some of us got more than others. I was only thirteen-fourteen years old so I just had one drop. Lovely, I tell you. Then we all trooped over to the neighbours’ place in one big jingbang. By then all it was the Irish family. The previous people were English and high class but these Irish people were down-to-earth and jolly, happily poured rounds of Guiness Stout and whisky and whatnot for my brothers.
Not my father, though, he was a teetotaller, didn’t get sucked into all those vellakaran habits, but still he always came along for the company. He always said he had nothing against the vellakarans as people, he just didn’t think they should go round the world claiming all the land as their own. I don’t think he ever said it to their face, though, after all he had to remember which side his bread was buttered on. He was working for them and he needed his wages isn’t it? But he would say it to my mother and my brothers and all.
Then there would be big fights, especially if my oldest brother had had one too many. He and my other brothers would say, If not for the British we won’t be here at all, we’ll be back in India slaving for some landlord and carrying the Brahmins’ shit. If not for the British even we boys wouldn’t have had any schooling, let alone the girls, who’ll be sitting at home waiting to be married off. If not for the British the sultans will still be keeping slaves here too, don’t forget. People will still be burning widows in India. The so-called high caste people will be running the whole show.
But my father would never budge an inch. So what? he used to say. Just because they had some good ideas doesn’t mean they need to go round the world taking other people’s land. We can use their good ideas and discard the rest just as they have done with our good ideas. We don’t have to fall at their feet just because they have white skin. They are human and we are human, that’s all there is to it.
With my mother the fight was different. Cannot even call it a fight actually. My father will say what he has to say and my mother will keep quiet. But behind his back, when he had gone off to work or when he was doing his gardening, she will come out with her own thoughts. That’s all very well, she’ll say, but as though this is going to be our land when we kick the British out. It’ll just be somebody else giving the orders and we Tamils scraping and grovelling to fill our bellies like we’ve always done. Doesn’t matter who’s at the top, we’ll always be at the bottom.
But you know what? With all the chances she had to say You see, I told you so, she never said it. Not even once. If she said it to anybody else, I never heard her. Only once, after May 13th, after the curfews were over and things were slowly settling down, my father said in anger, The British simply walked out and washed their hands of us, just like they did all over the world. Create havoc and then walk out, that’s their way. Get us to do all their dirty work and then walk out. Even all through the Emergency we were still doing their dirty work for them.
That’s the only time my mother talked back to him. Even to call it talking back I’m not sure, because she never raised her voice. She just said: We asked them to walk out. She didn’t even say you, she said we. We asked them to walk out. Then she said: we thought we’d be among equals what. All of us building a new country together. But what to do, it’s not like that. We pushed out the old masters and now we have new masters.
Masters are masters, their job is to count out the crumbs we’re allowed to have and make sure we don’t get too big for our boots. No point crying about it, the time we spend crying we could be using to put aside a bit more money for our own children and grandchildren.
One thing, my father was good at putting aside money. Before the Emergency he had one big biscuit tin full of cash, my eyes used to pop out of my head every time he opened that thing. See that amount of cash also I’ll feel scared, my legs will start shaking. But one day he gave the tin to my oldest brother to deliver to some business partner somewhere, they were supposed to buy a small fruit orchard together or something like that. My father put the tin in Perianneh’s hands and that was that. My brother would’ve played the big spender with his Close Personal Friends for a few weeks, poured them Cinzano and Guinness Stout and whisky, the whole works.
He was a real useless good-for-nothing, you know, but none of us could stop loving him. He’ll pour your whole life down the drain but then the following week he’ll show up grinning with a car full of bottles and tins, a purebred Alsatian dog, a cake soaked in brandy, stories to make you laugh until you cannot breathe. So my parents had to say goodbye to the biscuit tin, so they started over with another biscuit tin and vowed never to trust their great hero of an oldest son, so they hoped and prayed and saved like mad, so they saw the brand new flag being hoisted, so they learned one more anthem to add to God Save the King-Queen and Kimigayo, and then, there you go, May 13th came and after that all the reminders to know their place, don’t suddenly get soothu koluppu and go and ask for too much.
NAAFI is no more in this country. Sheep’s tongue you cannot find, and even if you find it I’m sure it won’t have the same taste. Corned mutton they have reduced the salt I believe. Salmon you can sell your backside to buy, my grandchildren tell me it’s because there is no more salmon in the sea, we have emptied the oceans. Kraft has come out with rubbish they still call cheese, to replace the lovely stuff we used to get in the tin. Few years back my son-in-law went and bought a bottle of Cinzano for Christmas. My grandchildren were laughing at him, What, Appa, is it 1955, they said. Gone out of style it seems. Well, I enjoyed it, even if the taste had changed just like everything else.
Let me tell you something: the number of times my parents had to shift you won’t believe, but somehow that old bottle made it through time after time. Over seventy years old by now, that bottle, and not one chip or crack in it. Even the label is still there, albeit faded and peeled off here and there, but you can still make out those striking letters. Once in a while if I have a few flowers I use it as a vase. The bottle my son-in-law bought I didn’t keep. Enjoyed the drink and all, but the bottle has no character, you see? But this old bottle I won’t let go.
Whenever any doonggu politician opens his big mouth to tell us Indians and Chinese to be grateful, sure I get cheesed off and all, I mean who won’t get angry at all that nonsense? But between you and me I’ll tell you, it doesn’t take much to make me feel grateful, you know? One ancient empty bottle holding a few stems of whatever you please, and I can look at it and think, you know, we had some good times. One after another they came, they queued up, each one took their turn to try to stamp out our good times and show us who was boss, but so what? We took what we had and made our own good times. They can keep coming if they want, all I have to do is look at this old bottle and I can still taste every drop of the good times.
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