Effervescent is an apt way to describe both the fizzy drink at the legendary ‘Ardeshir’s’ in Pune and its fourth-generation charge d’affaires, Marzban Irani (54), who enjoys retelling the antics of his great-grandfather Ardeshir Khodadad Irani: “He would light a charcoal bhatti (furnace), generate the carbon dioxide, dissolve it in water, and that’s how he made the soda water.”

Ardeshir does seem an alchemist. But history will argue that it was his entrepreneurial imagination that gave Pune its very own soda water manufacturing unit in 1884. This severed the cantonment city’s reliance on mules, on whose backs soda was ferried into the city from Mumbai (then Bombay).

Why go to such lengths? Well, if the history of the drink and the fizzy web it has spun across the ages tells us anything, it is that soda was a coveted luxury.

Born out of English chemist Joseph Priestley’s 1767 watershed experiment of infusing water with carbon dioxide gas, carbonated water was commercialised by the brand Schweppes in 1783. The bubbled bliss amassed quite a cult following. In Bombay, an aerated water factory, Rogers started in 1837 to cater to the rising demand.

Soda couldn’t be delayed, or there was pandemonium, as Ardeshir witnessed for himself one evening when he stumbled upon a bar brawl.

“Why the commotion?” he asked.

“The mules are late. There is no soda,” he was told. And so Ardeshir decided to come up with an experiment that would sate Pune’s soda appetite. He found a way to........

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