Great works

A very great person I know wrote this ages back in the magazine. See how it reads:

You have your recurring dream. I have mine. I’m sitting on a high stool in a dark’n’smoky bar in which someone’s playing a bad jazz track in the background. I’m in a collared-up coat — it’s cold and European outside — and am smoking a million Gauloises without once using a matchbox and drinking two Martinis at a time.
In this dream, the lady behind the bar looks straight into my eyes and asks in her Drambuie voice whether I would care for a Manhattan. I blow some smoke into her face and say ‘Sure’ without speaking, all the while humming that Jimmy Buffet tune in my head that goes:
"I really do appreciate the fact you’re sittin’ here
Your voice sounds so wonderful
But yer face don’t look too clear
So bar maid bring a pitcher, another round of brew,
Honey, why don’t we get drunk and..."
Which is when the needle scratches right across the record and I find myself back inside the top-floor drinking grotto at Moet’s Bar-Be-Que in Defence Colony, drunk as a rubber dinghy on the South China Sea. "Last orders, sir?" asks the waiter in a manner as distant from the girl with the Manhattan as Casablanca is from Pitampura.
Another evening of bar-crawling in Delhi ends in style.