Liquid Addiction
Inour house in Dalugama, liquor did not arrive with drama. It arrived quietly, in a brown paper bag, and then disappeared into the cupboard as if ashamed of itself. My father drank only at weddings or office functions. The bottle he brought home would stand upright behind folded table linen, gathering dust with a patience that seemed almost moral. I never saw him drunk. Never heard his voice thicken. Never saw the foolish gaiety that cinema associated with men and drink. If anything, the bottle seemed more restrained than the rest of us.
That was my first lesson in alcohol: that it could exist without ruling a household.
My own first drink — that awkward initiation I have written of elsewhere — came not from rebellion but from curiosity. There were friends, older boys, the scent of adulthood in the air. A glass passed to me. Laughter too loud for the hour. The burn startled me; it was less pleasure than proof. Proof that I could enter the fraternity of men.
But even then, beneath the bravado, there was calculation. I had seen other boys drift — Leo Gamini and others who flirted with excess as if it were a badge of daring. I had watched how quickly laughter could curdle into habit, and habit into need. The bottle, once ornamental, could become central. I told myself, with the seriousness only youth possesses, that I would never surrender to a liquid.
In my early twenties, I went to Dubai — young, thin, prematurely earnest — earning petro-dollars in a bank where the air-conditioning hummed with the confidence of oil wealth. Dubai in those days was not the carnival of glass it is now. It was spare, sandy, disciplined. To buy liquor required a permit. And one day, astonishingly, I was granted one: Dirhams 250 a month.
When a bottle of whisky cost twenty-five dirhams, that permit was abundance itself.
I still remember walking into the only authorised liquor store. The shopkeepers looked at me with disbelief. I looked like a schoolboy who had wandered in by mistake. Yet in my pocket was an official document authorising indulgence.
I bought as if planning a campaign. A bottle of Johnnie Walker. A bottle of Hennessy brandy. A case of Heineken. It was not greed. It was strategy.
On Monday, a small shot of whisky. Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday, a measure of brandy. Friday, perhaps a beer. I rotated my pleasures with the discipline of a banker balancing accounts. My reasoning was peculiar but firm: if I never allowed my body to expect one taste, I would never be enslaved by it. Variety, I believed, was my defence against addiction.
It was the kind of logic only a young man can devise — half wisdom, half superstition.
The truth was simpler. I feared dependency. I had seen men altered by it — their ambition softened, their families made wary. I wanted control. I wanted to prove that I could approach the edge and step back unmarked.
Years have passed. The petro-dollars are a memory. The boy in the liquor store is now a grandfatherly figure in Australia, where evenings are cool and measured. These days, I take a glass of wine before dinner. It is ritual more than craving — a pause between the day’s obligations and the night’s quiet. My children tease me. “Dad, you’re addicted,” they say.
I smile.
Twice a week, I pour a small whisky. Not out of thirst, but out of an old instinct — as if by changing the drink I can outwit habit itself. It is a private joke with my younger self, the boy who thought addiction could be avoided by arithmetic.
Was I ever addicted? No. But I have been attentive.
The bottle no longer stands dusty in a cupboard as it did in my father’s house. Nor does it command the table. It occupies a modest place — acknowledged, limited, contained.
Perhaps that is the real inheritance. Not abstinence. Not excess. But awareness.
Addiction, I have come to think, is not in the liquid. It is in the silence where something else should be. And if I guard against anything, it is not the whisky or the wine — it is that silence.
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