The Quintessential Hustler of Agra

I am writing this as we are headed back to Delhi from Agra. We braved a trip to the north for the junket – a fixed feature of Brad’s Indian trips. We met Prem at Agra.

Our travel agent had a package deal in a minivan to comfortably accommodate Brad’s girth and stature. Komal Singh, a sleepy driver from Garhwal with a pahadi ringtone, picked us up at the Delhi airport. After a few dusty stopovers to pay taxes from crossing state borders, taxes for drinking aerated water and taxes for general existence we were on a well-surfaced road towards Mathura and Agra. Somewhere on this road Komal slept at the wheel and we missed a disastrous camel cart accident that would have made us look like a bunch of kinky sex starved men trying a mangled bestiality maneuver with large animals. I pledged to keep Komal awake and engaged him in unnecessary conversation about everything other than quantum dynamics in a carefully cultivated chaste Delhi tongue. We crossed plenty of shantytowns, people, livestock, camels, three wheelers piled up with people and paraphernalia, dust devils and other accurate illustrations of mayhem (go Google Hieronymus Bosch). After a strenuous few hours we reached Agra.

Prem was a forty-year-old motor mouth with a bad dental plan and a penchant for one-liners. He, over the twenty odd years as a guide, has mastered the unmatched art of the gab and seriously believes that he is Woody Allen of the dust planet. He behaves like a stand up artist with a well-practiced gig and oft-repeated punch lines, body language timing and all. Altogether he comes across as the quintessential hustler you would not trust. He is the ripper, the rogue, the gallant savior of the vulnerable visitors, the lord of the guide-land, the well-connected human compass for the lost backpacking souls and above all the book of knowledge on Mughals. All of this packed in about five feet nine with gravity defying moustache and a deep gash on his temple that looks like a bullet wound. He limps a bit and he says he met with a two-wheeler accident a month back that lamed him for life. He owns a restaurant called Indiana (he added that Brad would know where Indiana is and we desis would not) in the dust tracks of Agra serving Continental, Chinese, Mughlai and Tandoor. The food, he says, is better than what you get in star hotels. We did not believe him as usual.

His monologues on the Taj Mahal and the Agra fort were engaging. He spoke in a strange diction and accent – a mix of splayed-in-the-middle cow belt English peppered with nuances of American and unrecognizable other influences from faraway lands. His demeanor was that of a self-proclaimed authority on five centuries of kings. He almost made us believe that Aurungzeb had to request Prem for permission in triplicate before he went to pee. Additionally, he had the fondness for painting the Mughals as a bunch of sexual deviants who watched there harem bathe in the royal Turkish baths or even better, lustfully watched them shop at the strategically installed palace market called Mina Bazaar (What?). He proclaimed at the Taj with great flair that ‘Love is not blind, Love makes you blind’. He also taught us that Islam prescribes visiting a mosque before visiting a tomb, that the Mughals believed in symmetry and so does he – he has two sons, two daughters and one wife as he puts it, that Shah Jahan had dozens of other women in his harem while he was deeply in love with Mumtaz, that the emperor had also planned a black Taj on the other side of Yamuna as his tomb with a bridge connecting it – white for feminity and love, black for masculinity and sorrow. It was all interesting and smart till he repeated them twenty odd times over the four hours we spent with him.

After all this he persuaded Brad to visit a bunch of organized handicrafts hawkers who promised to send everything but the Taj, packed and marked to his doorstep at Great Falls, VA for an exorbitant price. He persisted on taking us to yet another carpet maker who made any old rug look like a custom design that could fly for a price. I guess we did not fall for this and ruined Prem’s addition to marry-his-daughters-off or more-star-cuisine-restaurants kitty.

If you are a cautious traveler your heart is too weak for Prem. But if you are willing to take that pinch of salt and ignore his antics he is entertaining and certainly useful. Call on him when you are in Agra. Have a ball!

Prem Prakash Upadhyay, Tour Escort, Indiana Multicuisine Restaurant, Behind Hotel Ratan Deep, Fatehabad Road, Agra. Phone: +91.562.2332508 Home: +91.562.2411667 Mobile: +91.98370.57277.

Going Downhill

Hill people are plain good. I have seen this in Himachal, Kumaon - otherwise set in a godforsaken state, and now in Wayanad, Kerala. Even the men smile with an attitude. But they smile. They are extremely helpful and cordial.



We had to leave Wayanad and go to Guruvayur in Central Kerala. The route is beautiful. Like a wise friend of us said Kerala is beautiful because the mountain has to meet the sea in about 40 kilometres. Vythiri to Thamarassery is a bunch of acute hairpin curves with considerate disciplined truckers helping you through. This is how you go downhill in Kerala.

You reach the plains and realise the attitude and the general demeanour of the people has also gone downhill along with the landscape. It is like God rented his country out to a bunch of beings who are too superior to pay heed to others. Sad and true.

Prince of Ramadan

Sultan's Battery is a small town right after the forest in Wayanad - Tipu Sultan's station for his foot warriors, artillery and ammunition during the Raj. We entered this town during lunch on a fateful Ramadan afternoon in search of a good place to eat lunch. 20 of the 24 eateries are shut for the month and they said Prince was the best of the lot that was open.

Prince is like a smelly public sector club with one huge powder blue hall, pink Formica tables that are faded at the chairs, upholstered chairs and an old wall clock with a still pendulum and quartz mechanism. We were hungry and we ordered for some specials - Malabar fish biryani, Malabar chicken biryani and curd rice for Uncle Krishnan's stomach in disagreement. If you are in Malabar and the menu has a Malabar prefix to its dishes, walk off. Get up and find another place. We were too hungry and my daughter was chewing on my hands to do that. The lunch was served late and was a complete disaster. The entire order were variations of the South Kerala ghee rice. A bit of Fish Molly and ghee rice over it was fish biryani, a few pieces of crumb fried grease fest chicken and ghee rice over it was the chicken variation and hold your breath, a strange dry mix of curd and ghee rice was the curd rice.

If you are in Sultan's Battery during Ramadan walk away from Prince. Better still, do not go there during Ramadan for there is a whole lot of good food you will miss.

Why not?

The pleasant man smiled at me and repeatedly said 'ok' as I was screaming at him waving my credit card with a continuous banter of Malayalam and English. I speak a bit of malayalam and I thought it was an advantage. Apparently not.

We decided to stopover at Kalpetta in the Wayanad District of North Kerala before we hit Guruvayoor. Wayanad, popularly known as 'whynotf' ( keep the 'f' and prounounce it by letting out air through your lips as they close - like air brakes in a bus), amid Malayalees. So, with some help from friends living around there we got a booking at a place called Haritagiri smack in the centre of Kalpetta - the district headquarters. Downtown Kalpetta is a little over 23 shops, a few houses and a lot of bearded Malayalee men with a serious attitude.

Haritagiri main building looked like a boring census office that got a recent makeover with clip-on tile roofs and pre-gummed terracotta murals. We got ourselves a non AC twin bedroom cottage for five adults and two kids next to the pool. The pool was dull green in colour and you could not see beyond the second row of small tiles on the pool wall. I would not jump into it unless the state sanitation department and the pollution control board sent a Nair each to personally talk me into it. The cottage was clean and the food was divine with 'Erachi Olathiyathu' (beef dry cooked with a lot of curry leaves and black pepper for the uninitiated) emerging a clear winner.

I loved the place till I tried to check out. I politely told the lady at the counter that we are checking out. She looked at for a few loaded seconds as if I asked her to explain the most crucial snitch in quantum dynamics. Then she composed herself and said 'ok' and smiled. From then the plot goes downhill. In short - they charge me for three extra beds for five adults over two double beds, they add that the children are not charged, the extra bed charges are for an AC room, their credit card machine does not work, the repair man is coming from a star in a galaxy far away, they call the manager - a pleasant man with a smile, he gives me a discount on the room tariff and the tax is on the old tariff and here as if on cueI break into a breathless banter.

Eventually I paid all the cash I had, the change I keep in the car, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, some bananas and ran before they routed for my kids.

There is more where it came from...

This is working pretty well. I have quite a few stories from my design school and Delhi days that I can share with you. I did not realize that writing is easy when you are passionate about the subject and when you are describing events, emotions and textures of life that you have been through. Shall vow to write more.

The smell of time

It drizzled last evening as I ran back home from a walk with the kids. The rains have not stopped as I am writing this post at eight in the morning. Last night I decided to supplement our dinner with some punjabi protein - the tandoori chicken!

There is a new dhaba right next to the community gate that I live in and I called the guys up and ordered the fowl. As I was eating the meat in all its glory - the strange redness, burnt edges, the slight smell of charcoal, sardarjis and ajwain, goddamn, I remembered the sordid year in Delhi.

I used to live in a then suburb called Saket and my community was called Press Enclave. The place was teeming (?) with kurta clad confused socialists reading aloud Sartre and Mayakovsky to make their kids sleep. I was single then and I shared my apartment with a nocturnal friend of mine - an illustrator graphic designer. He slept through the day, woke up at around four in the evening, fixed breakfast of bacon and eggs, took it easy, made himself a drink and started work at nine in the night and worked through. This was his trick in handling Delhi. I was not blessed with such skills and I had to take Delhi head-on.

Delhi is very aggressive and if you are a sambar loving South Indian, it will stamp on you with such vengeance as if you are the runt with a sting. You have to be ready to swear or to be the victim at all times, twenty four seven. My morning to work included five minutes in front of the mirror, grimacing and repeating behanchod approximately forty times with varied tonality and pitch. You could have easily mistaken me for a method actor. And as I step out and ask the nimrod auto rickshaw driver to take me to work while he is picking his teeth with a screwdriver, he repeats ‘Klash Clooney? Nahi Jayenge!’. My Hindi was poor and gets worse in emotional distress. What I told him loosely translates like this ‘ Dear brother, you are creating a lot of trouble. You should anoint your vehicle with a board with your destination written’. He threw the screwdriver, loudly swore at me, deftly including my mother and sister in the rant. He then walked a little ahead complaining, burped, came back to his auto and put his screwdriver back to work.

The entire day was made of events with minor variations of this and me beating the retreat. The other party was either swearing at me or bragging about his diamond studded belt buckle (not one, he has three). I did encounter a one odd sardar who winked at me stressing the axiom that men are not safe in Delhi (if you drop something in Palika Bazar do not pick it up). I was plain bad at living there.

Eventually, I had no friends (with my only friend sleeping when I am awake) and I had these lonely dinners bought from a dhaba nearby. It was usually a small portion of tandoori chicken and an orange soda.

Yesterday I remembered the smell of those sordid times.

I have been lazy to think about writing a movie script. I have started a new blog to make you guys egg me on and help me create this script. There are a few things that I know in my plot. I am going to share this with alll of you and hope that you will post comments and guide this script to make it good. I will do a detailed posting of my outline and you can review that.

Visit my new blog for more details. Looking forward to work with you! Thank you.

The monastery at Bylakoppa.

Lunch beneath the wheel of life

Olive. If I remember right that was the name.

The Apparatus team had a disastrous outing this year. We went to this strange joint called Veerabhoomi supposed in the hills of Coorg (there was a small mound with a cheap replica of a cannon on it. A hill, they said). The food was atrocious and in the evenings we were invaded by public sector bank clerks in shiny safari suits having private party before the go home, beat their wives and pass out. This posting is not about that.

One of the days that we were in Coorg we went to this Tibetan settlement, Bylakoppa. Tibetans were offered land on lease by the Indira Gandhi government here and they have been there since then. Vinod called an unknown number and told Tsering that 16 of us are landing there for lunch. Wise thought and is more valuable as Vinod does not get them very often.

After visiting the monastery with a huge wheel of life we reached Olive Restaurant run by this friendly guy called Tsering (his brother is Tsering and his neighbour is also Tsering, we call him Tom). We had three massive bowl full of momos - pork, chicken and vegetables. The tables were laid out under a small shelter outside the restaurant and it was Tibetan poetry. I heard a voice and ordered a Thugpa - a soup style noodles with vegetables and chicken. As I relished it I understood the basic axiom of existence - me, monks, rain, thugpa, bliss.

That is the best meal I had after curries that resembled dead terns in Greenpeace videos! Thank you Tsering!

Nonsense poetry in T9 English

Oven fresh minds are hard to find,
Even leavened bread is a pain to find,
Yo cloven head diner
Wish for a bread like mind,
For oven even leavened mind is thine.

Pronounced grains of a gratifying breakfast

I am a sucker for a good breakfast. I can pretty much miss any other meal of the day. Sir, but surely not my breakfast. In one such endeavour to discover the perfect morning meal I found enlightenment next to a strange store that sells womens undergarments and thermal for the traditional South Indian H1B heading to some redneck country. We are talking Bangalore and this is on Indiranagar's CMH Road.

Suswad is a easily miss-able car garage converted onto a polite clean 'standing-joint' as they are known in this part of the country. Suswad Idli Bazaar serves the best upma that I have ever eaten. Upma is a strange dish. With a slight lack of attention it could end up resembling post office glue (probably tastes like that too). A good upma should have pronounced grains of rava well lubricated with a perfect mix of moistness. On the other hand you can make upma with pronounced grains that is dry as flaked thermocol (this is the kind of stuff that is served in malayalee homes and they mix it with coffee and eat! YES COFFEE! Is there a place where we can complain about this? In triplicate?). The Suswad upma is the right blend and is completely delectable.

I am not a great fan of beans and carrot pieces in my upma. I love my upma uninterrupted. However the Suswad upma is sparsely interjected with discreet pieces of vegetables that I have learnt to enjoy. If and when you are walking on CMH Road to buy thermals or find H1Bs stop over at this place and you will know what I mean. Down this with a coffee and DO NOT MIX IT FOR GODSAKE!