Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian Page B

practices slip into operation like well-worked gears. A shaaaaaap owner will dump sugar into his toddy to make it more palatable. He will ramp up the kick of the drink, pouring in cheap vodka or dubious arrack or country liquor. Some owners, I was told, powder dried marijuana leaves, tie them into a bundle of thin cotton cloth, and soak the bundles in the toddy. Mahesh Thampy, a friend living in Trivandrum, has heard even more horrific stories, of old batteries dropped into vats of toddy, for the acid to mix slowly with the alcohol.
    ‘You have to remember, most of the people who go to these shops just want to get high as fast as possible and leave,’ said Thampy. ‘Nobody wants to sit around and drink the good stuff. Which is why there is so much bad liquor floating around, so many newspaper headlines of blindness or even death because of illicit alcohol.’ He told me one fantastic story of sitting in a bar in Trivandrum. ‘Suddenly there was a power cut, and the lights went out. In the silence, one agonized voice cried out: “Oh my god! I’ve gone blind!”’
    The arrack-mixed toddy, in local parlance, is called
‘aana mayaki,’
which reassures its drinkers that it is strong enough to addle an elephant. ‘It’s all controlled by the liquor mafia here in Kerala, of course,’ Thampy said. ‘Two or three years ago, somebody calculated that even if every coconut tree in Kerala was tapped, you wouldn’t get the volume of toddy that is being served in the state.’ Trivandrum has its share of liquor plenipotentiaries, including one gentleman who goes by the zippy label of Yamaha Surendran. Thampy promised he wasn’t making that name up.
    Meeting Thampy was my introduction to a world where, I was told, work stops for toddy. Thampy is a clean-cut, neatly moustached man who runs a thriving real-estate business in Trivandrum. He has an MBA, and he is intelligent and earnestabout his work. But on a Monday morning, he was still eager to troop out of town, onto the highway, in search of a good toddy shop. Indeed, the only person who showed any alarm at all at our agenda was our peach-fuzzed young cabbie, smiling nervously as he examined the prospects of an afternoon of driving drunks around the countryside.
    We began inauspiciously. When we entered our first toddy shop, the owner personally came out to discourage us with vigorous gestures from staying, claiming that he had no good toddy on hand. For a barkeep to turn away paying customers seemed astounding, but it confirmed what Thampy had told me about the rigid product differentiation—about how certain types of toddy are only sold to certain types of people. I had exactly five minutes to mull over that nugget of economics in the cab before we stopped again, at a ‘toddy garden’ further down the same road.
    In one of the seven cabanas with wine-red curtains and blue wooden benches, we were brought our toddy, as pale white as diluted buttermilk, served in earthen pots. On the tongue, the toddy fizzed gently, a mild and lazy alcohol that sauntered down your throat. Thampy sipped twice and proclaimed it fresh and ‘very decent’ compared to some of the toddy he’d had before. I wasn’t going to point out that, in comparison to battery-acid toddy, that was no great accreditation.
    Toddy-shop food is strategically kicked into a high orbit of spice, so that customers constantly demand more toddy to soothe their flaming tongues. Our mussels, which arrived first, had been quick-roasted with coconut, curry leaves and coriander, and then buried under lashings of chilli powder. Done differently, in another dish, the mussels looked like giant spiders that had waded heroically through batter only to then accidentally fall into hot coconut oil.
    But the staple of every toddy shop is its kappa-meen currycombination. The kappa—bland, steamed lumps of tapioca, tempered with coconut and chillies—is such dense starch that, according to the laws of physics, light should not be