For years they perched themselves comfortably on the altar of what used to be our home in Gurgaon, in the company of universal spirits of oneness and belonging.
"The She" ... the pear bottomed dark and glowing Goddess Henessey, Paradis Rare, the presiding diety of our household.
And Her consort...
"The He" ... enclosed in a see-through phallic-shaped mouth-blown glass, Baba Bunnahbhain... 25-year-old and getting stronger every single malt year after year as the rarest of rare.
Both untouched ... and uncaressed by the lips ...
Celibate and celebrated ...
Virgins.
And ageless.
Revered and venerated by every guest of honour who came home to lunch or dinner.
Bunnahbhain, had come in earlier. Much older than His years of maturity suggested. He had flown down from Heathrow way back in 2010, and would have actually celebrated His 37th year of Becoming this summer. Paradis flew down much later, from the primordial desert of Arabia, Duty Free Dubai, to be precise, in 2012.
Yet, before long, She occupied the pride of place on The Altar... while He made do with meditation within his wooden casket in a corner, even as several other spirits from here and there made merry and disappeared every now and then under the watchful gaze of the seductress snake from Vietnam digging into the venom of a scandalous scorpion trapped in her magic bottle of virility.
And they sat there quiet and long over the years through many ups and downs and two consecutive lockdowns when temptation desperately held back in the face of isolation.
"We shall celebrate the spirits of our presiding deities, The Goddess and Her God Consort, some day," I would occasionally tempt my family whenever kinsfolk dropped by in ones and twos. But it would have to be the entire clan at one table, I insisted.
Folks who suffered me silently wanted the divinities to be left alone... and to "themselves". Getting the entire clan to toast would amount to an unholy communion, they complained.
"Imagine the crowd gathered at your hovel for a mere drop or two on their tongues?" some wondered aloud.
They had a point.
And so, I convinced myself, both Goddess and God would stay where they were, exclusively to nourish my soul when my time would have come.
We Hindus make a fetish of pouring a drop of Ganga jal (water) on the tongue of those departing to die, in an ultimate act of liberation.
I would end my journey with two drops of water imbibed in the holy spirits of France and Scotland ... one each of Her and His -- sacred Hennessey and Bunnahbhain the ageless old.
They had no other choice.
Alas! That wasn't to be.
Providence conspired to give us a fresh lease of life instead of the drops of two or... a few more, perhaps, on my ageing tongue.
And we set sail for The Promised Land at the close of the year gone by.
In the final countdown to our flight to fantasy, we uncorked many a spirits that would have otherwise wasted away in many a bottles.
To celebrate whoever came calling.
Yet, She and He remained Unviolated!
When we touched down by the Potomac and got busy with our life, finding our way down the labyrinth of the neighborhood watering hole, I would often wistfully wonder what was up with our She and He under the watch of the Vietnamese seductress Snake liquor.
The Trinity were idling in good company back on the altar where they would remain forever. I repeatedly reminded myself.
Till kingdom come!
Yet, for good or for worse or verse, perhaps, that was not to be.
A distant phone call woke me up with a rude shock well past midnight last night.
The Devil had broken in, the gods alone knew when, and decamped with both Him and Her, sometime between this weekend and last.
Our home had been ransacked in search of the elusive booty that's currently sailing down the Suez Canal en route to Baltimore harbour.
The Devil may care about what else we were leaving behind, I had felt before finally flying out of Delhi, taking all "things precious" and our precious memories, momentarily forgetting Goddess and God who were maturing silently for their moment of freedom.
Finding nothing else worth his salt, The Devil finally carried away Henessey and Bunnahbhain from their caskets where they had been left to meditate alone, leaving behind the enchantress viper on watch.
"What will you recover from filing a first information report," the local police inspector told my brother when he dialled #100 to report the break-in at our home where nobody lived any longer and had been given up to the spirits.
"At least, the blokes who sneaked in, will bless your brother in Amreeka, for a precious takeaway to warm their spirits on a bone chilling winter night," the cop in control claimed by way of counsel.
It's hard to figure out how long that warmth will last. But there's no denying that the spirits are finally free.
PS: I checked out the online listing for Henessey Paradis Rare Cognac and Bunnahbhain XXV Islay Single Malt. They are listed at $931.94 and $649.99, duty free, respectively.
That's expensive.
But nothing can ever be as precious as the household deities of our hermitage in Palam Vihar, that had been maturing on the altar of sacrificial denial for 12 and 10 long years.
Finally, cheers to that!
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