I have been away from Kerala, my homeland, for almost 20 years now. The thought of returning for good never crossed my mind — till last Thursday, when the government spelled out its plan to make Kerala alcohol-free in ten years.

Before you get ideas of I being a teetotaller, let me make it clear that I like my whiskey only in large pegs, never small. Those who gasp at the word prohibition don’t know the fun part of it. Believe me, I have been there, done that. I landed in Hyderabad in 1995 when NT Rama Rao had just introduced prohibition. Initially it was frustrating, being denied one’s weekly quota of ‘mandu,’ as the Telugus call it.

But soon I discovered the pleasure of finding bootleggers, and the process of procuring booze became as heady as having it. Indeed it was costly at Rs 500 a bottle of rum and Rs 750 for whiskey, given that one’s salary then would not be enough to throw a party for a handful of friends.

As a reporter, the battle for the bottle expanded my network of sources — to watchmen, jawans and the dark underbelly of Hyderabad. There was Raju, a bank watchman at day and bootlegger at night. I don’t know about the safety of the bank’s vaults near Khairatabad, but Raju guarded his crate of Hercules Rum like a sentinel. One had to clank the latch on the bank’s gate a specific number of times in a peculiar rhythm that only Raju and his regular clients knew — and this he kept changing every week — and Raju would emerge from the dark, the bottle cradled in his arms.

Then there was John (hi John, hope you have retired and aghast in Kerala) an army man at a barrack near Nampalli station. At midnight, I would sneak into the nondescript building that was the shelter of a dozen jawans, and ask for ‘sadhanam.’ Those who didn’t know the code word and walked in to ask for rum or whiskey were driven away at gunpoint; you ask for ‘sadhanam’ and a smiling John comes with a bottle of sparkling dark XXX Rum ‘for defence services only.’

This network endeared me to many senior journalists in Hyderabad. I was, in effect, the journalists’ bootlegger. Soon after sundown, my office telephone would start ringing. The bureau chief of another newspaper wants two bottles of whiskey, there’s a promotion party at his place; I am invited though. Free drinks were the bonus of good contacts. When I wasn’t in office — those days cell phones were a rarity — my pager would beep with messages like ‘are we reading or writing tonight?’ Reading meant rum, writing whiskey. Remember, you had to dial a call centre to tell the sweet lady your message to be sent to the friend’s pagers. Code words, you see.

The richer tipplers took to mobile bars. You hop into a car stacked with liquor, drink as much as you want as the driver takes you through the city for an hour or two, and you get dropped— happily sloshed. On weekends, there were ‘conducted tours’ of insipid places on the Andhra border where the only activity would be binge drinking on Saturdays and Sundays before you get back to work nursing a hangover.

Prohibition as a state policy dates back to the Xia Dynasty in China more than 4,000 years ago. Several countries and a few Indian states have tried to impose the dry law, and most of them realised the stupidity of it sooner than later. In Gujarat, where the law is in force, you get the best brands of alcohol delivered at your doorstep. In Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, where the official dry law runs, you get the most indigenous of alcohol, distilled from rice, bamboo shoots and plantain.

I can’t wait to have all these in Kerala. In Chennai, I have to grapple with my sufficiently drunk brethren at dingy Tasmac shops. Soon, in Kerala, I could put my feet up, dial the nearest bootlegger and say: “Make it a double large, Mr Chandy.”