The just one

Dr Fahim Chand | Monday November 24, 2025 08:40

My backpack was already packed, my brain had clocked out, and my legs twitched like a sprinter on the blocks. Then, at last, the bell rang, sweet liberation! We erupted outside like jubilant prisoners on perfectly legal parole. The excitement level spiked as the imaginary adrenaline meters inside us lurched into the red, fuelling wild speculation about the glorious days ahead, now that early-morning alarms had been sentenced to a long, merciful hibernation.

We clustered in the parking lot, scanning for the family vehicles that would whisk us away from our academic penitentiaries. And yes, while we grumbled theatrically about our “gruelling” workloads, we were only in primary school, our maths burden stopped well short of calculating rocket-propulsion trajectories to Mars.

We merely dabbled in the arithmetic foundations of future greatness, hardly the toil of heroic labourers. Still, we searched eagerly for our getaway vehicles, each one a ticket to our personal, hard-earned nirvana.

As we neared home, our chatter shifted to the next great mystery of childhood: What’s for lunch? I quietly prayed it wouldn’t be tarkari and rice. And for the uninitiated, tarkari means curry, yes, curry, that iconic dish the British adore so much they practically knighted it.

Why someone of Indian origin like me doesn’t list curry among life’s great pleasures remains a mystery. Perhaps my palate, like my ancestry, is Asian, but my heart is firmly African.

Anyway, food concerns soon faded before a far greater thrill: we were off on holiday, as we always were during the long break, to Duiwelskloof, South Africa.

My grandparents, uncles, aunties, and cousins all lived there, tucked amongst sweeping mountains and towering trees just an hour from Pietersburg, now rebranded as Polokwane.

I adored this place. Even during apartheid, the town never felt menacing. We wandered freely, perhaps thanks to Uncle Suja and Uncle Amin, who had somehow earned the respect, of the local Caucasian power brokers.

Days and nights were spent roaming with my cousins Shaheed, Zaheer, and Aadila, navigating Main Street toward the legendary café. I can’t recall what we actually bought there, but I vividly remember visiting my grandfather’s shop.

Every so often, he’d open the giant fridge in the middle of the store, reach in, and pull out an ice-cold glass bottle of Coke, its curves glistening, droplets racing down its sides, crowned by that bold red cap proclaiming to the universe that this was the Coca-Cola. And everyone knows Coke tastes better in a glass bottle. Why? Some chemical wizardry, I suppose, but I never asked, and certainly never cared.

We humans do love our beverages, pouring rivers of cash into the companies that make them. As children, our indulgence was Coke; adults, once diplomatically old enough, graduated to alcoholic options.

But while we all accept that soft drinks are basically liquid poison for the body... what, then, should we think of their boozy cousins? A large study examining data from more than 400,000 people set out to answer a familiar question: What does alcohol really do to the body? We often reassure ourselves with the comforting phrase, “Just one won’t hurt,” but when it comes to drinking, that may be exactly the problem.

Enjoying a single daily drink seems like a harmless indulgence, yet even one glass can begin triggering measurable changes in the body. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine recently revealed just how far those effects can reach.

Published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, the study analysed data from 434,321 adults aged 18 to 85, and the results were unsettling.

People who had one or two drinks on four or more days each week were 20 percent more likely to die prematurely than those who drank three or fewer times weekly.

While earlier work hinted that a daily drink might offer limited cardiovascular benefits, the new evidence suggests the risks clearly outweigh any reward. And when it comes to cancer, the message was stark: any amount of drinking increased risk. So perhaps “just one” isn’t the reassuring promise we thought it was.

While the findings are sobering at the very least and downright terrifying if we’re being honest, those of us who don’t drink alcohol can take comfort in knowing that, for us, these conclusions remain purely academic footnotes.

And though I’m not much of a soft-drink devotee either, I still savour the memory of my Duiwelskloof Coke. In that chilled glass bottle I found laughter, happiness, and the easy warmth of family. Some beverages harm you; some heal you. The trick, I guess, is choosing the ones that fizz in the right direction.