An interview with Kishan Behrupia? What forms can it take?

Kishan Behrupia Jocker whose business card promises monkey tricks, wedding shows among other things, lives in a tent by a gushing greyblack sewer. He is an incredibly talented man who is illiterate, vocal, political , an artist and social satirist. But by now I’ve met many people like this. In Dharavi with the unforgiving television camera, in dozens of villages in UP with an academic mind, in Tamil Nadu as a student, in Andhra as a child.
I’ve jammed all my judgements, my social frameworks in there , that sentence , I’ve tried to lay there a lattice into which a journalist sprinkles impressions , cut pieces of a life she has interviewed.


How do I remove myself and my judgements and allow the person to be, to express so that I can take home a human being in my Dictaphone and then begin to unravel the layers with fairness and serve them as carefully strung sparse words the spaces between which Kishan Behrupia lives.
I don’t know how. But when I meet him, he sits me down in his tent open on both sides, one facing the sewer. Kishan wears an old red and white bed sheet the kind you would get for cheap in the pre theme park exhibitions in the nineties. He wears a frayed green kurta , bright against his jet black skin and hair
He opens his black bag full of the world .He has performed in New York, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy everywhere. He pulls out more treasures, an old frayed certificate from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York , from the Dubai World festival, a Delhi Times article, a Dubai newspaper with his photo and then his passport.

‘’I am not lying ‘’ he says looking at us, sincerely doubting us. ‘’I have been everywhere. You can see.’’he says pointing to five schengen visas given to him saying that it enables him to go to every country- Spain, France – many others.
“Mein unka basha bhi bol sakthi hun. Ola, bonjour, tres bien, cava bien .’’
All in one breath.
Then he crouches and growls and chatters his teeth. His six year old nephew follows. They have become monkeys. They will become Charlie Chaplin . They are behrupias. Impersonators.
They can be anyone. They can steal from the present and save from the past – they can be Gods and monkeys and Bollywood stars. They sing, they mimic , they compose lyrics that tell you that with the promise of a little money , everyone is corrupt. Kishan’s eleven children aren’t in school. When I ask one of the boys if he will grow up to be a behrupia, Kishan rudely interrupts me saying he already is a behrupia.
The daughters cannot and traditionally there were never women behrupias. ‘’humare bhi ijjat hoti hain. Hum gareb hote hain lekin humarey aurat ghungat pehente hain.Aur unke shadi pur hum beez theez hazaar detey hain.’’ We also believe in status, in respect. Our women cover their heads and we pay dowries of twenty to thirty thousand rupees.
Initially he wanted money to be interviewed. I had to beg him to agree that we as a policy don’t pay people we interview. I felt bad about it because who I am I really to tell a man living below poverty line that he should give me a few hours of his time for free.(He gets FIVE HUNDRED TO THOUSAND Rupees , a day on his trips abroad but much less on normal days) . But then I wanted to meet him. He was pricey on the phone but no trace of that when we actually met. In fact I feel so much affection for this man who lives in tent by the gushing greyblack sewer. He ordered limca soon as I arrived but thankfully accepted my pleas against it.

Is that allowed though – the affection – as an interviewer I mean?

Money is not something he has a lot of . ‘’Delhi ko Paris banana chahte hain log. Lekin ma’am , Delhi Paris nahin hain. Mein Paris Dekha hun ma’am. Vahan pe bhi hota hain , log lal batti main aake saphaye kartein hain.Lekin humara desh key gareb log key jaise nahin hain ma’am. Vahan unko pension milta hain, sarkar madad karti hain, unkey baccho ko school bejti hain.’’ They want to make Delhi Paris Ma’am. Delhi is not Paris . I ‘ve seen Paris. Even in Paris there are people who clean car windows at traffic signals. But they are not like the poor in our country. They get a pension, the government takes care of them, the government sends their children to school.’’ All in one breath.



But you know what, all that I have written is haphazard. I want to be able to put all this coherently, listen to the one and a half hour interview in Hindi and write and know at the end of it that even if my piece is not incredibly creative or evocative, that I have been fair to him.
Because you know if a journalist interviewed me hastily, she would conclude that I am spaced out, messy haired, pseudo , lost etc. Here is an excellent photo essay on behrupias.


You can read the story in First City Magazine. Available everywhere in Delhi, in Odyssey in Bangalore and some places in Bombay.

Sambar by gora? Thanks, but no thanks!

Remember the time when there was talk of Sonia Gandhi becoming Prime Minister and everyone was angry about why a 5000 year old culture, a country with one billion people needs a foreign prime minister? Indians have pretty much the same attitude about food – we’ll eat all types but we don’t want the goras and the expats messing with our culinary traditions, do we?

I mean, I don’t mind.
I love it when the food boundaries splinter and you can have a khichdi that’s sort of a ‘’ non-syrupy Indian basmati risotto’’ or ‘’Gul-aam- gulab jamun with aam ki kheer’’, scallop brochettes with raw mango and black lentil khichdi.
I love it when cuisines blend like water colours ever so harmoniously. Obviously my first experiments in blending unlikely flavours began in boarding school when we’d crush boiled egg into sambar or put jam in the porridge. For a while after though, I was fated to eat only boxed cuisine like paneer butter masala and butter naan or adai with avial. There is the occasional paneer dosa, the concept of which I abhor, Schezwan idly which can be nice and since I am a pizza purist- paneer on pizza is blasphemy.

There is this fashionable vegetarian restaurant in Edinburgh – David Bann where for instance you can have Chilli with sweet potato and chocolate sauce-
A chilli of butterbean, kidney bean and tomato with roasted sweet potato and corn cake. Served with green beans, guacamole, chocolate and chilli sauce with crème fraiche
Now, in Switzerland I went to Restaurant Hirscheneck, the rebel among restaurants – the only place in Basel where you will find more than one woman with a nose stud and a long colourful skirt.
Bright, informal and loud in a welcoming way, the chefs here pick elements from Asian and European styles of cooking and come up with a different menu every day. Locals say it was a hotspot during the student protests of the 70s and 80s and it seems like a relic from that time and spirit.
But the menu is as new age globalization as ever – Sweet potatoes served with a Thai sauce and Swiss cheese. (This was divine). These two restaurants were my first experiences of creative food, of food as an art, as a representation of the world we live in where we’ve learnt to adopt each other’s cultures in some parts of our life – culinary or otherwise.
C is an expert at inventing recipes although cooking is relatively new to me.
As he says one of the yummiest ’fusion’ things he makes is a roll made of Mexican chapatti(tortilla), sugo all'arrabiata (tomato sauce with herbs and chilli) , Asiago cheese and lots of fresh rocket leaves – essentially Italian and Mexican influences. But it worked- the sharp flavour of rocket and the rich full bodied spiciness of the sauce nicely balanced by the mild cheese.
He just put these things together and it worked.
Now getting to my point about experimental Indian cooking, this article talks about why India is the toughest market for modern Indian food. A part of the reason they say is the attitude that foreigners can’t do better what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.
We don’t want someone from Dover to reinvent Dal Makhni for us but apparently that’s what expat celebrity Chef Vineet Bhatia does in Delhi.’’ Dal Makhani that’s first scorched and then scolded in a liquid grinder into a thin, intense buttery sauce, and finally laced with truffle oil to give it shine’’ And spicy foie gras that even Bikki Oberoi admires.
There is this restaurant I remember in Belfast (out of all places) that did Indian tapas. Even I laughed. The first time I heard of Tapas is when I ate at Zara in Chennai but Indian Tapas seemed like a strange idea to me. Not anymore.


Ofcourse, only when food types accquire snob value do they make it to magazines.
Because oppossite the World Trade Centre in Cuffe Parade,Bombay, 5 enterprising men set up a makeshift stall every evening and sell the most magical invention ever - Mongolian pasta. This costs hundred bucks but we know that only South Bombay people would pay that much for street food, that is if they ever eat it at all.
Come on guys, Puritanism in food is passé.


(Photos from Tehelka)
1)Gul-aam
2)Patti aloo with beetroot khichdi
3)Roast lobster with brocolli khichdi
You might like to read about ME and the art of cooking.

Indians not allowed ...Madam

Marie and I reach Rishikesh after a nauseating but beautiful ride through the mountains overlooking the gorgeous emerald of the Ganga. We spot a couple of signboards for cottages and guest houses that we recognized from the guidebook as cheap places to stay. Marie waits downhill as I carry myself and my yellow bitchsack  of a handbag up the hill to EVERY single guest house there was.

At the first, called New Bhandari Swiss Cottage , if you please, I ask for a room and they take one look at me and say ' No rooms'. I walk up to the next one called 'New Swiss Cottage'. They refuse me.

I go to Mama guest house where a sweet Nepali waiter guides me to meet the Mama who he says will show me the room. When I meet Mama, she takes one look at me and says there are no rooms.

I can see that half their rooms are vacant. Discouraged, I walk on anyway and try THREE other places and I am refused everywhere. In my head, I am sure it is because I am Indian. I went back downhill and asked Marie to go try.

 

So, she goes up to the first place, New Bhandari ''Swiss Cottage'' and gets shown a room immediately.

I am so angry and humiliated by this point that  all I am thinking of is wanting to ''fuck their happiness''. So we go and check in anyway because of the lack of options.

 

At the reception the guy is kind of shocked to see me again with Marie and refuses to meet my eye.  I ask the guy why he lied to me about there being no vacant rooms. He tells me that Indians are not allowed. I told him that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of nationality. He says that according to rules, he cannot take in Indians (Presumably, he allowed me because a) If I am the friend of a white person, I am safe? b) He just felt awkward about throwing me out  and risked losing Marie as a potential customer.

I continue to argue with him when he finally says ''Madam , since you insist so much , I have to tell you that these guys come from Delhi and disturb the Goras- the goras hate them.'

I am somewhat flattered to think that he believed that I had as much power as a ''bunch of guys'' from Delhi but seriously, why would I a young woman alone be a threat to his stupid Swiss cottage?

 

How can we be treated like this in our own country? Over breakfast , I tried to rationalize it wondering if those people from Delhi he talked about really caused havoc. But then, you can't generalize and I am still really angry and humiliated. What was the right way to respond? Just say that I didn't want the room or insist on my right to stay.

Overheard in a secular newsroom

'''secularism and democracy are words thrown around by page 3 people like you , they mean nothing, the muslims will eat up hindus if not for people like Modi and Bal Thackeray


''So , Hindus demolished babri masjid but the muslims lifted the sword first , they deserve everything they get''


''but narendra modi has done so much for development of gujrat''

rape a couple of muslims, rip out foetuses from muslim vaginas and burn them, build bridges, bring the nano to gujrat and hug ratan at a press conference , the press will then concentrate on the better aspects of you mr modi. :)