Hop, skip and jump!

The first time I had beer I could barely stop myself from spitting it out. ‘Yikes, people actually drink this?’ I thought, looking aghast at my cousin bro and his wife, lounging in a beach shack, with at least 10 empty bottles scattered at their feet. It was about eleven in the morning. I was 17 or something similar.
I looked at my new sis-in-law, hair in a wild mess, guzzling away to glory and thought, now why beer of all things? That’s such a guy thing. What on earth did he see in her?
Stuffy? I could have been worse! I could have been one of those girls who snort at beer!
I had tasted port wine, taken surreptitious sips of rum at my dad’s bar and decided rum was my thing. But beer? Sadly, it had me cold from the start. It was bitter and left a horrible aftertaste in your mouth. It made you go to the loo 1500 times and gave you a belly afterwards (as I gathered looking at veteran beer guzzlers). And it was something dad and his buddies drank out of crates while watching cricket or football. Not something for a decent girl to have.
Or so I thought.
The pink-papered girlie visions vanished the moment I landed in Bombay. I stayed with a family friend in Chembur and when aunty and uncle wanted to celebrate my admission into the course, there was nothing at home but…beer! ‘Argh!’ Aunty and me twitched our noses but uncle urged us on. ‘C’mon, it’s only one mug!’
At the introductory session of my mass communications batch, the other girls talked about their ‘changing the media’ and ‘being Rupert Murdoch.’ M, who was sitting next to me, chuckled, held up her Styrofoam coffee cup and said, ‘Hi, am from the beer city, Bangalore. Cheers!’
My education in the golden tipple had begun.
I did try and get back to rum. But I had never really been into it and was accosted by 'beer buddies' from all possible quarters. The thing is that beer grows on you. You find it bitter at first, then take the next sip thinking it would be better, and then the next and before you know it you have finished an entire mug and LOVED it!
The best part? You don’t wake up with 40 hammers knocking on your head (at least I don’t). You just wake up late.
M and I become the best of pals and shifted in together, as the cranky nuns thankfully thought we didn’t deserve the hostel. Before I knew it, I was a beer convert. It helped to be part of an evenly divided mass coms batch. You were either into beer or wine. If you didn’t drink anything, you were on our side, because we, the beer drinkers weren’t alcoholics. With all that barley and water and yeast, it was like having a cake or a nice piece of bread, only liquid. And good for health to boot. What excellent stone-free kidneys were we going to have!
Strangely, for all this talk of beer not being a girl’s drink, most of my girl pal bonding had been done over beer. Perhaps most girls I know drink it or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that right after the course, I jumped into a newspaper, where I met a bunch of fellow-alcoholics masquerading as ‘reporters and sub-editors.’ I joined gang with the con-women pretending to be the ‘Features Team.’ The rest, as they say, is history. Or should I say, her-story?
(And I finally understood what my cousin saw in that girl)