An Ampoule of Wine

Circa 2006. Having passed our final exams, me and Yash were doing our internship in Assam Medical College. Yash was the person who introduced me to spirits (at first, ostensibly to celebrate quizzical wins and later for everything and anything else) and was a self professed expert on alcohol.

One fine evening, getting caught in the spirit of things, we decided to try some wine. We trooped to the nearest wine shop and bought a bottle of wine. To accompany the wine, we took some 'chana' from the roadside 'thelawala'. Back to Yash's room we went.

The lights were dimmed, music was put on. Phones were put on silent (him after calling up his girlfriend, I was single then) and out came the bottle. That is when we encountered our obstacle of the day. Ensconced comfortably from the mouth of the bottle to the neck, was the cork. I was a novice and Yash usually drank hard liquor, so no arrangements existed to uncork the bottle in the room. Ever resourceful, Yash thought for a bit and decided that a Swiss army knife would do to uncork the stopper. 

A list was drawn. Of people who had/possibly would have had Swiss knives (no one probably would have had the originals, but we were sure that even the fake ones would work well). We zeroed in on two people- one a senior and another our batchmate. Now, the bottle wasn't too big and we were in no mood to share, so it was evident to us that we needed to make some other excuse for borrowing the knife. Fortunately, Swiss army knives are multipurpose, so we invented a loose screw in one of the windows and borrowed the tool.

"Watch and learn", Yash told me and began screwing the uncorker into the cork. I waited in anticipation. After diligently putting in almost the full length inside, he pulled on the knife. The cork held. He put the bottle on the ground, gripped it with his feet and pulled. The cork held. He pulled harder. And it broke. The appendage of the knife broke off, with its length embedded inside the piece of cork. We would need a good excuse for a knife breaking while tightening screws.

But there was another knife in the hostel. All wasn't lost. Yash managed to borrow it and back to work he went. The results were same. Only this time, we had the broken appendage in our hand. The mutilated cork seemed to be grinning at us.

"There are other ways", muttered Yash and started carving up the piece of cork with the knife. It was easy going till he reached the part that went inside the bottle.  The knife couldn't grab a purchase and so we were stuck. By now, it was almost an hour since the adventure started. It was hot and sweat was pouring down our faces. And the thirst increased. The liquid inside seemed to be teasing us.

"If we can't take it out, how about pushing it in?" I ventured. Yash grunted and thus we tried pushing in the cork. Success still eluded us. It seemed that the cork had somehow come a little to the outside rather than going inside! Twenty minutes or so of trying to push the cork inside, tempers were running high in the room with me chiding Yash for his so called knowledge and experience about all things alcoholic and he shouting at me for being a good for nothing. 

Finally, exasperated, Yash said, "Let's do the ampoule." The 'ampoule breaking method abbreviated ampoule' is how you break ampoules in order to draw medicines for injection.  You hold the ampoule by its base, with its upper end facing away from you. With a blunt object, like the back of a knife, you hit on the neck of the ampoule and it cleanly breaks off. The ampoules are designed so as to break, but a bottle of wine?

With no other option in sight, we decided to do it. We took a bucket and kept it beneath so that no wine got spilled. And then, Yash struck the blow. Surprisingly, it broke in one blow. Though some pieces of glass did manage to get inside the bottle. We took out a clean handkerchief, filtered the wine through it and sat down to enjoy the wine.

It was cheap wine but it tasted good. Maybe because of the effort that went into opening it. Maybe because of the nearness yet the distance between our lips and the liquid contained inside the bottle. Maybe because of the satisfaction of a job well done. Maybe because we had mastered the technique of breaking ampoules.

Nowadays, when I see a bottle of wine, my eyes instinctively seek out the top of the bottle to see whether it is capped or corked. And then I smile, recalling our little adventure with a bottle of wine in a small hostel room  in a rainy town. Invariably, a word forms on my lips and I mutter "Cheers!"