What a theka is, and what desi daru is

Three different things share this word and it is worth separating them before anything else. The first is the one used here: a theka is a licensed country liquor shop, the small barred counter selling desi daru and cheap spirits in nearly every Indian town. The second belongs to Hindustani classical music, where theka is the repeating pattern of strokes a tabla player uses to state a rhythmic cycle - the basic phrase that identifies a taal and holds it steady underneath a performance. The third is the everyday Hindi meaning: a contract, or a lease. That third one is not a coincidence. It is the origin of the first.

Alcohol retail in India is a state subject, and no state sells liquor by simply opening shops. It grants the right to sell - a contract, allocated by licence or by auction, under an excise department that regulates manufacture, transport, possession and sale. The person holding that contract is a thekedar, a contractor. The premises where he exercises it became, in ordinary speech, the theka. So the most common word for a liquor shop in north India is a piece of excise bureaucracy that escaped into the language. Delhi's licence categories still carry names like L-6 and L-7; nobody outside the department uses them, and everybody says theka when they mean the liquor shop.

What it sells is the other half of the definition. Desi daru, also called country liquor or Indian-made Indian liquor, is distilled from molasses, a by-product of sugarcane. Indian-made foreign liquor - IMFL, the whisky, rum, gin and vodka brands you see in a hotel bar - starts from the same molasses-derived spirit and is then rectified and flavoured to imitate imported styles. The gap between them is not really chemistry. It is excise duty, which is minimal on country liquor and heavy on IMFL, and it is class: desi daru has been called a labourer's drink for a century and the label has stuck, which is why a shop selling it looks nothing like a shop selling the other kind.

The physical place is consistent from Karnal to Kanpur. An iron grille with a small window in it. A counter you do not stand at so much as reach through. Boxes stacked to the ceiling behind a man who has worked out what you want before you finish saying it. No seating, no glasses, no chakhna, no music system - just a transistor or a phone somewhere behind the counter, playing whatever the owner likes at a volume set for him and not for you. A crowd from about six in the evening. A dog. A plastic stool that is not for customers but gets used by one anyway.

It is not a bar and the difference matters. A bar sells you an evening; a liquor shop sells you a bottle and expects you to leave. In parts of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi there is a middle option called an ahata - an enclosed yard or small eatery attached to the vend, with plastic chairs, where you can drink what you just bought and order something fried alongside it. That is as close as the format gets to hospitality, and it is where a lot of this country's actual drinking is done.

The vocabulary around it is worth knowing if you have never stood in the queue. A quarter, or pauwa, is a 180ml bottle and the default purchase. A peg is the measure poured from it, thirty millilitres for a small one and sixty for a large. Chakhna is whatever you eat alongside - roasted chana, boiled eggs, sliced onion with masala, a paper cone of namkeen - and the word literally means tasting. None of this is dignified and none of it is trying to be.

The rules change every few hundred kilometres, because excise is a state subject and every state writes its own. Gujarat has prohibited alcohol for decades. Bihar banned it outright in April 2016 and has held the line since. Shops in most other states shut on dry days - Republic Day, Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti at minimum, plus election days and a longer list in some states. Timings, permitted strengths, minimum ages and even bottle sizes differ across borders, which is why the road between two states usually has a shop at each end of it.

So why name a music site after a liquor shop. Because of the transistor behind the counter. The songs that play in these places have never been anybody's editorial project - they are Kishore Kumar and Haryanvi DJ tracks and Bhojpuri and ghazals and last year's Punjabi hit, in whatever order the owner feels like, and it is the most honest playlist in the country. There is even a song about it: Theke Pe, by Khasa Aala Chahar, one of the biggest Haryanvi records of 2021, which is set at exactly this counter. This site is six of those rooms with the lighting adjusted - gham, jashn, ishq, yaari, desi and talli - and the songs picked by one person who has spent twenty years sitting in them without drinking anything.