When I was a child, one of the objects of display in the showcase of a middle-class Bengali home would be a miniature bottle of VAT 69. I don’t know if this was a custom in other parts of India, but in Bengal, especially Calcutta, it certainly was.

As far as I remember, the miniature would be made of plastic, but otherwise it was a good replica of the original squat green bottle, down to the red seal near its neck. The bottle, about a few inches tall, displayed prominently inside the glass showcase along with exquisitely detailed and realistic clay figurines from Krishnanagar or the not-so-exquisite seashell animals picked up from Digha beach, performed a complex but important purpose.

In the Seventies, even the Eighties, alcohol was not tolerated so easily in middle-class Bengali homes. VAT 69 was, as it still is, whiskey. Or perhaps whisky, as the discerning would say, as it is from Scotland. So what was it doing in the respectable Bengali homes, next to the sofa draped with cutwork antimacassars?

Not that there was alcohol inside the mini bottle. It was quite empty.

VAT 69 had been invited lovingly into the sanctity of these homes because it was a symbol of prestige. It was “foreign”, which meant it was from the West and posh, and therefore was an object to be looked up to. Gleaming from inside that showcase with the patterned glass doors, the VAT 69 minis, like the visiting relatives from “the States” or from “London” —they were always from the States or from London — proclaimed “status”.

Because VAT 69 had by then taken pride of place among the “foreign liquor” brands available in India. No other alcohol brand wasin its league in popularity, although a famous comic actor was named after Johnny Walker. But in the Seventies, maybe in the Sixties too, all self-respecting villains of Bollywood, vile as they were, had the decency to drink VAT 69. Pran drank it. Prem Chopra drank it. If a heroine had her heart broken, she needed to sing, after a generous helping from a VAT 69 bottle. If our fathers drank alcohol, it was usually VAT 69, but at a bar or an office party. Our mothers did not drink.

VAT 69 spelt class for the middle class. Yet accommodating any alcohol, despite its stature and background, would be problematic. Hence the miniature bottle came in handy. It was a whisky bottle without the whisky.

It was pure Idea. Perhaps it even allowed one to look at it and perfectly imagine the pleasures of drinking. Perhaps he (no, not she) even got drunk, in an ideal kind of way, without a stain on his virtue. It was doing it without doing it.

I don’t think this was hypocrisy. It was cute. It was adapting to our own needs something from a different world that we admire. We are still doing that. Little Ben on the way to the airport comes immediately to mind. So do Wonders of the World installed in Eco Park. They have been compressed to fit our reality. It does not matter if we look a little smaller in the process too.

I would like to know where the miniature VAT 69s were sold from. I would like to have one today.

What I cannot stop thinking about is how differently we look at the word “foreign” now. We had used such tact and grace to accept VAT 69 as one of us, at a time when the evidence of liquor even in a grown-up son could forever alienate him from his ageing father. And then how the nation discovered the joys of Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL). Which is such a wonderful contradiction in terms. Only an inherent inclusive spirit can think of such a concept.

But now the country is turning its own citizens into foreigners. Even a real big bottle of VAT 69 cannot drown my sorrows.