It began, as the best and worst ideas often do, on a train in India.
I was somewhere between Ahmedabad and Delhi, watching the dusty world blur past, when the Ticket Inspector arrived. He was a serious man with a magnificent mustache and an air of absolute authority. We chatted about the heat, the delays, the usual things. Then, out of nowhere, he fixed me with a keen eye.
“You drink?”
The question, so blunt and personal, threw me. “Uh… sometimes?”
His stern expression melted into a conspiratorial grin. “Good. You want one?”
Before I could formulate a polite refusal, he’d blown his whistle in a sharp, coded pattern. The train, with a sigh of metallic protest, began to slow near a cluster of huts that definitely did not feature on my itinerary. “Come,” he said.
We hopped onto the sun-baked gravel. A man emerged from a shack as if summoned. Two glasses of clear, ominous liquid appeared. Desi daru. It tasted like fire and regret, with a hint of agricultural runoff. We threw it back in two searing gulps, the Ticket Inspector nodded to the universe, and we clambered back onto the moving train. As we picked up speed, I felt a warm, illegal glow spreading from my stomach. I later read that such batches sometimes remove unlucky drinkers from the gene pool, but at that moment, I felt invincibly connected to the rhythm of India.
This, I realized, was not an isolated incident. It was the beginning of a theme: Alcohol and Its Astonishing Accomplices.
My next lesson was in Lahore, Pakistan, where the divine and the bureaucratic have a complex relationship with booze. For tourists, it’s a simple matter of paperwork. I went to the government office to secure my precious permit. The clerk, a friendly man named Imran, processed my forms with efficient solemnity.
“Everything is in order, sir,” he said, stamping the final document. Then he leaned in. “The permit allows… let’s see… twelve units.” He paused. “Perhaps you could… share some of the units?”
“Of course,” I said, the memory of the train stop making me agreeable to most propositions.
“Excellent! Finish up!”
Paperwork completed, we were suddenly two friends on a mission. I hopped on the back of his scooter, clinging for dear life as we weaved through Lahore’s glorious chaos. Our destination? The fortress of international legality: a five-star hotel. Inside the chilled, marble-clad lobby bar, Imran, now off-duty, proudly purchased a bottle of Scotch whisky with his own money. We didn’t drink it there. We just bought it. The transaction itself, the legal purchase under the silent, understanding gaze of the hotel staff, was the intoxicating part. He dropped me back at my hotel with a handshake and a grin, the contraband safely in my bag.
The pursuit wasn’t always about subterfuge; sometimes it was about beauty. In Darjeeling, I’d gone to see mountains but found myself captivated by something else: Tibetan Raksi, a rice brew, and the women who served it. Their traditional chubas, sleeves sweeping gracefully as they poured, were more hypnotic than any distant, cloudy peak. The Raksi was deceptively smooth, and the evening melted into a warm blur of swirling colors, laughter, and the profound discovery that homemade liquor and stunning embroidery are a potent combination.
This global tradition, I learned, is not confined to Asia. In Norway, the land of breathtaking fjords and sobering prices, I was introduced to hjemmebrent – “home-burnt” moonshine. The national pastime wasn’t just skiing; it was calibrating the exact ratio of rocket fuel to orange juice before heading out to a club where a single beer cost a kidney. In Kristiansand basements, among impeccably dressed Scandinavians, I learned that the universal sign for “this will peel paint” is a cheerful thumbs-up and the word “Skål!”
And then there was Kovalam, in the old days. Before the resorts, there was just a thatched shack on the beach selling glasses of arrak distilled from coconuts. You’d drink the rough, sweet spirit, feel the sun set, and watch the fishing boats become silhouettes. It was perfect, simple, and completely outside any official licensing framework.
Back on the train to Delhi, the glow of the desi daru now a comfortable ember in my gut, the Ticket Inspector winked at me.
“Good journey?” he asked.
“The best,” I said. And I meant it. Because the real story of travel isn’t just about the places you see. It’s about the liquid, often illegal, hospitality you find there—the shared, secret glasses that offer a fleeting, burning membership into the hidden, human club that exists just beside the guidebooks. A club run, it seems, by ticket inspectors, government clerks, Tibetan hosts, Norwegian friends, and coconut shack proprietors the world over.
Just maybe check for methanol content first.
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