An excursion into the black market

After my little adventure at Sparks night club, I, with my german pal decided to go back to the fixer's place to continue our evening of eating and drinking (seeing as how the nightclub closes at some laughable hour). We hung around the premises for some time afterward and about 2:30 or so took off for this guy's place which he said was "close to the IIT." Somewhere along the way, we made a little side stop. We walk down a little alley that is completely dark... Who's this? Someone working? No, I don't think so. The Fixer turns to us and asks what we want. After a moment I understand and say just rum. We had the other fixings (supposedly) of water, orange juice, other fruit juices, etc. So the other indian guy disappears for about a minute and emerges with two small bottles of old monk rum. "Two hundred." Ok, I guess that's the price to pay at 3:00 AM. It's usually 60 or 70, but no matter, I got to see it.

After an excursion of no more than 5 minutes we hop back into the rickshaw and power away to the fixer's place. He turns on his band's music (it's ok, very western sounding, a bit of a rip off of DMB, but no matter) and promptly passes out, and falls off his own bed. My german buddy and I finish off one of the tiny bottles of rum and a full pint of orange juice and decide to let the guy sleep. We kill the music, so he doesn't have to deal with an angry land lord, or wake up with too much of a headache.

We finally catch a rickshaw back to IIT and to my neighborhood for way too much money, but we all made it home safely having spent too much money and I got to see my first glimpse of the black market. What I saw wasn't particularly impressive. For what it's worth I could probably score something similar to that in most big cities in the United States, but it was fun to see. I am certain a only saw the first drop in an ocean of illicit activity, but I got to spend some of my money doing something mildly illicit. Good times.