The costliest wine

 Shyam Sunder and helper Bijender are repairing cracks in our old house. One day they work till late in the evening and get a bonus of 150 rupees meant to buy a bottle of desi liquor, their main incentive for extra work. They leave happily with the prospects of boozed-up relaxed moments after the daylong hard work. The next day, during a break, they are sitting on a bench side by side. ‘What is the cost, you can imagine, of the single peg of the costliest whisky?’ I asked. I had recently read about it in the papers and since then loved flummoxing the liquor lovers by baring the surprising fact. Shyam Sunder, the head brick layer, took a long-long draught at a beedi for inspiration and seriously deliberated over the question for a minute. ‘There are very rich people around. It must be around 10,000 rupees for a peg,’ he reached the end of his imagination about the figure. Bijender, being his loyal helper, promptly seconded him. Then I informed them that the figure is 4 crore 70 lakh rupees for a single peg of Japanese whisky. It didn’t fit in anywhere in their scheme even in the wildest of imaginations. No wonder they took it as a joke. A PJ in fact that didn’t elicit even a tiny peal of laughter. But we have to understand that it’s a small world for them where big sums appear a joke. If not for this, how will they even melt their bones under inclement weather on construction sites for a daily wage as low as a few hundred rupees?