I lived in Madras from my twenty-fifth year to my thirty-second. I had a good salary, a car and a house, and my association with the Madras Players and my Oxbridge background saw to it that there were plenty of attractive young women around me.

Madras was under prohibition the seven years I was there. When I arrived, drinking was rare in the middle class, especially so in Brahmin families. By the time I left, it was quite common to find some ‘social drinking’ going on in the evenings. As drinking gained popularity, it became harder and harder to find alcohol. But I was working at OUP, and from time to time we had visitors from England and other countries who were eligible for a liquor permit. As soon as they arrived, we would whisk them off to the excise office, have them write out in the appropriate bureaucratese that there was danger to their health if they failed to consume alcohol, get a signature, take them to Spencer’s, and buy the quota of bottles allotted to them. It can be said that true independence from foreign rule arrived in the state only with the lifting of prohibition.