He watched me hand over a full glass of brandy with just a splash of water to Joppan chettan.

‘There’s only one place where everyone is equal,’ he said and proceeded to recite a poem written by Amitabh Bachchan’s father and explain its meaning to us Hindi-less ignoramuses.

‘Bair badhate mandir masjid mail karati madhushala . . . Temples and mosques make people fight with each other while the wine bar unites them. That was a favourite poem of Chacha Nehru.’

‘Which country has the most beautiful women? Lebanon or Egypt?’

This, my next question, had to be asked carefully. If he felt I was being impertinent, he would kick me out. If not, I could listen to some salacious stories, like the one about a journey he made from Bombay to Ernakulam in the company of seven beautiful women who were cabaret artistes. It was long before I was even born. Peter sir had accepted the responsibility of bringing them to dance at a friend’s hotel.

‘We didn’t sell a single ticket,’ he had told me. ‘In those days, if people knew you were the type of person who went to cabaret shows, you wouldn’t be able to find a bride. It was not half as bad as some of the things we see on the television these days. Still . . .’

But this time, Peter sir ignored my question. Holding on to his walking stick, he stood up and walked slowly towards the eastern room. The big cupboard with sliding doors in the room had belonged to Mary teacher. Leaning the stick against the wall, he knelt on the floor in front of the cupboard and opened one of the sliding doors with some difficulty. A cockroach landed on him, and he flicked it away with a shout. Extracting a bottle of wine, the colour of the evening sky, he got up and placed it on the table.

‘This is the only bottle left,’ he said.

Poured into the crystal glass, the wine foamed, thick and red like the blood of a young woman. I sank my fangs into the rim of the glass and sipped, sloshed it around in my mouth, and swallowed.

Mary teacher used to give bottles of her home-made wine to guests as gifts to take home. ‘It is sweet wine,’ she would say, ‘let the women at home drink it. Even children can have it.’

‘If Mary teacher were around, we could have eaten beef cooked with koorka with this,’ I remarked, chewing on the tasteless turtle meat Joppan had cooked and spitting it out. Peter sir raised a corner of his mundu and wiped his eyes. It was the first time I had seen him cry.

‘Sir, you are like Duryodanan,’ I said, trying to change the subject.

‘Well, he was a reprobate like me.’

‘That’s not what I meant. A good story needs good villains. Don’t you think Kumbhakarnan is a more compelling character than Sreeraman?’

‘So let’s all be sinners then,’ he said sarcastically.