Bhel puri just might be my favorite Indian food. A snack commonly prepared and served on the street, you can find it in restaurants, too. It’s hard but not impossible to find it in the U.S., where Indian restaurant almost always means a predictable menu of Northern Indian dishes, often dismal and boring.
The dish is a perfect mix of sweet, sour, hot, and spicy, plus soft and crisp. It always includes sev—delicate crispy yellow noodles—and puffed rice. There’s usually chopped potatoes and onions, and sometimes tomatoes. It’s all tossed with a spicy sweet-hot sauce and topped with green coriander leaves. It must be eaten as soon as the ingredients are combined.
Bhel puri walla, Bombay, 1989.
I discovered bhel puri in 1989, my first trip to Bombay. I was intrigued by the long line of people buying from this humble bhel puri walla. Using only his hand, he mixed fistfuls of the ingredients in a bowl, then transferred the concoction to another bowl for the customer to eat from, right there. Yep, I got in line. Nope, I didn’t get sick.
Bhel puri cart, Bombay, 1989.Bhel puri and other street food for sale, Bombay, 1989
Once I recognized the ingredients, I began to see dramatic displays like these all over the city, each more artistic and appetizing than the next. I ate at many of them.
Savoring the last few bites of bhel puri on Chowpatti Beach
In March of 2010, I saw very few street food vendors, no bhel puri wallas. Perhaps I just didn’t walk in the right streets, though I criss-crossed the city and spent much time in Colaba, as I did in 1989. The food stalls on Chowpatty Beach, long famous for bhel puri, have been swept into a permanent organization of stainless steel stands, similar to Singapore’s street food culture.
Chopping onions at Chowpatty Beach.
I had excellent bhel puri (and many other dishes) at the vegetarian Kailash Parbat on Colaba Causeway. Across from the restaurant, they run a sort of glorified street food stand, at which one can order all the standard snacks and sweets. I had incredible panipuri there, one after another until I had to hold up my hand and reject the last of the six that come in an order, handed over one by one. Panipuri are crisp hollow spheres, punctured and filled with spicy potatoes or chickpeas, then topped off with spicy, cumin-flavored water. The entire fragile globe must be placed in the mouth, sometimes a tricky maneuver for a small mouth. The payoff is a satisfying burst, a crackling, a flood of liquid, an explosion of flavor and texture like no other.
Delicious do-it-yourself panipuri at the upscale restaurant Soam, in Mumbai. Mysore paanki, steamed between banana leaves, is peel-and-eat spiciness.
The vegetarian restaurant Soam is a few block’s walk from the north end of Chowpatty Beach, and definitely worth the trip. The small, trendy place serves upscale versions of street food and Gujarati home cooking. Bob and I loved it.
Jackfruit for sale in 1989 Bombay. I didn’t see any this time, though it was the same month.
Beer is served in tall, iced dispensers at Leopold's the famous cafe that was bombed in 2008.
I drank fresh coconut every day from this vendor around the corner from our hotel.
Reviewing my 1989 photos, I found the same heap of coconuts in front of the same temple on Colaba Causeway.
7:00 a.m. in the Colaba Market area, where life is lived outdoors as much as in. Residents were just beginning their day. Someone was asleep on a handcart under a cloth. Others slept on the ground, on palanquins, on steps. A man stood in the road brushing his teeth vigorously with his finger. A boy sat among his goats, which nuzzled and cuddled him. Men and women arranged technicolor produce in baskets, for sale. Handcarts rushed by in every direction.
A chicken truck squeezed through the narrow lane, carrying seven stories of live caged birds. The driver hung a scale from the back of the truck and extracted a fistful of chickens—that is, a fistful of their legs. They hung upside down like a giant flapping pompom as the murgh-walla tied the bundle of legs and hooked the now calm birds on his scale. A customer, or perhaps he was a delivery-man, threw three large bundles over his shoulder against his filthy shirt.
Around the corner, a banana truck unloaded huge stalks of green bananas onto the shoulders of runners. An old, frail man came back again and again, each time carrying three massive stalks stacked on his left shoulder, while a larger, younger man carried two stalks.
Cats, dogs, goats and babies played in the dust and litter. Bob and I were ignored, or greeted with smiles and waves. Several Colaba Market residents directed us to some nearby point to see the sea. We wandered off in that direction, leaving the wide street of multi-story buildings. We wound through labyrinthine alleys of rickety dwellings and make-shift shelters of scraps and tarps. Customers were already seated in an open-air barber shop, a tailor measured and cut cloth, and a man pressed trousers with an antique iron full of glowing coals.
As we approached the sea, the dusty ground became black muck. A gang of small boys ran around us with squirt guns. “Water shower!” one shouted, as he fired a stream into the air. Old wooden boats lined the route to the bay, tilting in the mud, weeds growing through their broken bottoms. Black crows perched on their structures, surveying the garbage strewn about. The stench was overpowering. It became clear to me that we had entered a dump. A few lone men and boys passed us, walking through the putrid sludge toward the water. I hurried forward, eager to get past the fetter—until I caught sight of the view.
A hundred small boats lay bobbing on the still water of the bay, colorless and silvery against the white morning light. Across the bay, an easy walk away, the red dome and new tower of the Taj Mahal Hotel rose in stark contrast to trash-strewn beach at my feet. I was transfixed by the disparity, and began taking pictures. Crows cawed and little waves splashed against the rocky shore.
Suddenly I noticed the few men here and there on the beach and at the water’s edge. I was staring at their toilet. Appalled and mortified, I hurried away. Bob followed. We cut through a low part of the slum instead of retracing our path. It was neat and organized, with muddy but clean paths. The friendly smiles of women and children just starting their day helped me recover from my shameful, insensitive behavior. A tiny girl ran behind me calling “auntie! auntie!” When I turned, the child game me a huge grin. “Happy Holi,” she said, giving us a useful phrase that made everyone smile.
Holi is India’s spring festival of colors, a day on which people get wild and crazy and throw colors in the form of powdered dye.
Another day, after a fabulous meal at Soam, we walked the few blocks to the north end of Chowpatty Beach and began to walk south around the huge crescent of sand packed with people. A tiny naked boy ran up to us, hand out. He was filthy and gorgeous, and trotted along side us with bouncy little steps. He couldn’t have been more than five years old.
We tried to ignore him, afraid he’d get lost following us so far. I wondered if he had a mother, and how such a young child could be allowed to run loose and barefoot through dangerous traffic. Did he have anyone to care for him? I wondered what he’d do if I scooped him up, washed him, and fed him. Would he eventually feel a need to go back “home”? Did he have a home? Would he know how to find it? Or would he be content to stay with strangers who took good care of him? Then I wondered how the Indian government would react if I said I wanted to take him home and provide for him.
I was sad when the little boy finally left us. I worried about him finding his way back. But maybe “back” was just a point—the spot where he found us, with no other significance. Maybe he has no place at all; he sleeps where he is when he gets tired. I saw quite a few children asleep in strange places. One boy of three or four was sprawled across the middle of a busy sidewalk. That he hadn’t been trampled seemed a miracle.
Later, a former police officer from Mumbai told me that the boy definitely had someone watching him, and that he’d been sent to beg. At least his perfect little body hadn’t been maimed for “professional” advantage.
A huddle of people sat on the sidewalk at the edge of the beach. A woman was tattooing the arm of her customer. A boy held together a stack of D cell batteries from which a pair of wires connected to the buzzing tattoo gun.
Bob and I saw less misery in the streets of Mumbai compared to previous visits. We saw fewer people sleeping in the open, and far fewer beggars. On arrival at Mumbai airport, visitors used to be circled by aggressive beggars the moment they stepped outside. That situation no longer exists. Police told us the city is able to feed many street children, but that it’s an enormous financial drain.
This visit, I saw very little street food outside of officially regulated restaurants. Bhel puri, the famous Chowpatty Beach snack, used to be made à la minute at carts on every corner. Trucks and taxis do much less horn-honking now. Restaurants are smoke-free.
Our cool and quiet hotel was right off the hectic Colaba Causeway. A table in the lobby held two thermos pitchers, one of sweet chai, one of arabic coffee. Between them was a small water-filled bowl in which four tiny glasses were submerged. As the day went by, the water got cloudy and murky. The water (and glasses?) were occasionally freshened.
“I WANT,” is the driving force behind mugging: need and greed. But these muggers in India also had intangible desires that compelled them to behave in a way that surprised their victim. After a recent visit to Mumbai, my friend Paul McFarland, a cruise director, filed his report.
Thanking Muggers
After years of travel there are a few places that I still get excited to visit. Mumbai, India is one of them.
After a delicious meal at the Khyber restaurant, I waited for a taxi outside. I planned to go to Victoria Station, the train station in downtown Mumbai, to take photos of the beautiful building and the colorful people.
A black and yellow taxi pulled up, reminding me of a bumblebee; not so much because of the color but because of its size. It took me some time to fold my 6′ 3″ frame into the back of the vintage vehicle, and I was no sooner in when the driver hastily sped off. We quickly reached top speed and began cutting and slashing through the traffic. I felt like a bag of rice being thrown from side to side. Fortunately my outstretched arms could reach each side of the vehicle and that alone kept me upright.
The driver sensed my discomfort and asked if I liked Indian music—as if that would soothe me. I didn’t want to set him off by saying no, so I nodded. Big mistake. His voice sounded like a snake charmer’s flute as he sang, and he let go of the steering wheel, wildly waving his arms as if he were a classical dancer. All the while he was driving faster and faster, narrowly missing ox carts, cars, and pedestrians. I finally screamed at him to slow down, whereupon he glanced at me in disbelief and started to sing his song slower. The good news is that I arrived at Victoria Station in record time. Little did I know this was just the start of my adventure.
I got out of the taxi much quicker than I got in—so happy I had arrived safely that I gladly overpaid him by 200 rupees. I had plenty of money with me as I planned on giving a few rupees to some of the people as a thank you for allowing me to take their pictures.
Mumbai fruitwalla near Victoria Station
Victoria Station loomed large across the busy intersection and beckoned to me to photograph its architectural beauty.
On the way I stopped every few feet to photograph the colorful, happy people at the markets that had sprung up on the streets surrounding the station. They were selling everything: from watermelon with slices of fresh pineapple chilled with melting blocks of ice, to scraps of material, to cheap padlocks. Because my camera was new I was concentrating on the viewfinder, focused solely on my photography. I wandered freely throughout the crowded market and, even though I was by myself, I felt very safe. I’ve enjoyed many wonderful visits to this exotic and exciting country without any incidents and had no reason to believe today would be any different.
Even though I didn’t buy anything, the street vendors seemed to enjoy having me look at their items. I think it added some credibility to their card-table stores. I weaved my way through the vendors and crossed the street to capture a good panoramic view of Victoria Station. As I walked along a roadside barrier, I kept my eye on the building.
Mugged in Mumbai
I didn’t notice a taxi approach me from the opposite direction. It pulled to a stop right next to me and two young men got out. At the same time someone tapped me on my shoulder. As I turned to see who it was, the two men from the taxi immediately dropped down in front of me, grabbing and wrapping themselves around each leg.
My first thought was, my God these beggars are a lot more aggressive than they used to be; but at the same time two men jumped on my back, one holding onto my left arm and the other one going for my backpack which contained more camera equipment. Another one wrapped his arms around my waist. I must be watching too much of the Discovery Channel because I remember thinking: I’m like a wildebeest on the Serengeti being pulled down by a pack of jackals. Even though the wildebeest is much stronger, the jackals can bring him down through perseverance.
I staggered forward wearing five young men. Then it occurred to me that they weren’t trying to hurt me, they were just trying to detain me long enough to pick my pockets. Within seconds I reached for my wallet but it was it was already gone. This enraged me and I tossed two of the young men to the ground. But I noticed at the same time that one of the boys was running from the scene dodging traffic as quickly as his flip-flops would allow. His hasty departure told me he was the one with my wallet.
I tried to pursue him, but there were still three thugs hanging onto my legs and waist. I was able to quickly rid myself of the young man around my waist but I had to use my camera as a hammer to get rid of the human leg irons. They were no match for the Nikon D300 and dropped off. Then I was free to pursue the thief with my wallet.
I ran across the four lanes of traffic yelling stop thief at the top of my lungs, hoping to gain attention and support from the many locals in the area. But he had already made it to the other side of the road and had merged with the millions of Indians at the Sunday market. My heart sank, knowing that my chances of ever seeing him or my wallet again were nil.
Sidewalk barbers in Bombay
I wandered through the market, carefully scrutinizing every face I saw. After about ten minutes, realizing my search was futile, I headed back to the road. I now looked suspiciously at the same people, and now their beauty and innocence were gone. I was sad about that. Little did I know that there was still more to my adventure.
The black and yellow bumblebee taxis were all lined up looking for fares, but not necessarily looking for me because, in this part of town, few of the drivers spoke English. In these situations, rather than asking drivers if they speak English I ask “Did it snow last night?” if they say “yes, no problem,” I know we’d have a problem if I got in that taxi.
After quizzing eight to ten drivers, I found one I thought understood my destination. I was relieved that I had remembered before leaving the ship to stash some cash in other pockets in case of just such an emergency. I climbed into the taxi and he took off in the direction of my ship, giving me confidence that I had made the right choice.
We’d been on the road for three or four minutes, giving me time to organize my thoughts and do a mental inventory of what was in my wallet and what steps I was going to have to take when I got back to the ship. I realized that the wallet contained three credit cards, my drivers license, my PADI dive card I’d had since 1976, and $250 cash.
My concentration was interrupted when suddenly another taxi pulled up next to us with two young men in the back seat yelling at my driver. My driver tried to ignore them at first, but eventually was forced to the side of the road by the other taxi. I couldn’t believe it was happening again, and I braced myself for another attack. I thought: the bastards know I have more money because I got in a taxi and they’re after every penny.
I gripped my Nikon for action as the two young men jumped out and quickly threw something in the back window that landed on my lap. Thinking the worst, I threw myself out of its path—only to discover that it was my wallet. To say I was surprised to see it is an understatement. I opened it and realized that my credit cards and everything but my money was intact.
As they fled, I was so relieved, I blurted out the window, “thank you,” as if they were India’s version of Robin Hood. I thought: you’ve really lost it now—thanking muggers! My taxi driver smiled at me, and we once again took off for the port. On the ride I double and triple check my wallet, thinking it was too good to be true to have thieves go to the effort to track me down. Why had they chosen me to attack, and then why in the world would they take the chance of being caught by returning it?
Musicians in Colaba, a Bombay neighborhood
I wasn’t sure if my driver knew that I’d been mugged when I got in the taxi, but I was pretty sure he figured it out. So I asked him why they returned my wallet and he gave me in a one-word reply: Karma. I remembered reading that in the Hindu and Buddhist religions Karma is most important and is based on actions or deeds. The thieves initially created very bad Karma for themselves, but by returning my wallet perhaps they hoped to balance it out with a good deed.
Once back at the port I told the ship’s agent about the incident and he asked me to describe the attackers. I told him that there were six or seven of them, and that they were all about 5′ 6″ to 5′ 7″ with dark hair and dark complexions. I added what I thought would be a helpful detail, remembering that they all wore flip-flops. He seemed amused, and I embarrassingly realized that I had just described not only my attackers, but probably five million other young men in the city. I quickly added that one of them might have a unique imprint on his forehead—that of a 28 x 200mm Nikon lens.
Bottom line: I lost $250 but that’s not what I’ll miss the most. I’ll miss feeling safe in a city I still love.
I can thank the Parsis for my passion for photojournalism.
Another man might have turned away, but when I saw a vulture picking the limbs of a dead child, I raised my camera. Perhaps that says more about me than I should reveal.
Instead of burning their dead and feeding the ashes to the River Ganges as Hindus do, Parsis lay the bodies of their dead on a grid suspended over a high tower. To attract vultures to the burial tower, corpses are smeared with rancid animal fat. The scavenger birds pick away the flesh and the cleaned bones then fall onto the earth, lime, and charcoal floor of the tower to decompose into the soil. How I came to witness this alien rite was through the same set of circumstances that so profoundly impacted my career.
At twenty I hadn’t yet decided whether to become an entertainer or a photographer. My true passion was travel, and the more off-beat and distant the destination, the better. To fund my expeditions, I took engagements as a performer for four to six weeks in faraway countries, and at the end of the gigs I would trek into surrounding villages and countryside.
Performing in the Far East in the sixties gave me a unique opportunity to visit cities that I otherwise would never have had a chance to visit for such extended periods. While my craving for photojournalistic excitement was supported by my show income, I made an effort to meet local authorities and make the right contacts intending to pursue photojournalism with a bent toward the absurd.
Bob Arno’s path to pickpocketing
Even way back then my show was unusual—pickpocketing had never been seen as entertainment. It was my ticket to the exotic destinations most people only dream of. And on my journeys I witnessed, sometimes inadvertently, headline news. Neither ordinary tourists nor visiting journalists could have had such easy access to behind-the-scenes briefings. For I was tied to the U.S. Military.
Bob Arno, 24
I had always had a strange desire to capture macabre images with a camera. It started as a hobby, then became a semi-profession during my first journey to Asia. In 1961 I toured Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Japan as an inexperienced entertainer. I augmented my performance salary by taking freelance photography assignments in locations where Western photographers were still a bit of a rarity.
The world was hungry for unusual stories from Asia then. As a young and raw journalist with little comprehension of the underlying political issues of the area, I came face to face with the dramatic events of the day. Being in the right place at the right time was at the heart of my earliest photojournalistic adventures.
With the beginning of the war in Vietnam, U.S. forces were building steadily in the Far East. These were the darkest years of the Cold War and the fear was of China’s involvement in the Indo-Chinese conflict. Everyone was concerned about the war escalating and spilling over into the Philippines, Thailand, and Korea. The large U.S. bases in the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Okinawa, and Japan all needed entertainment for the troops.
Most of my performance engagements then were for these American soldiers. My comedy pickpocketing was new and different and audience participation was always a hit. I had long contracts on the military bases, as well as in the civilian clubs—camouflaged girlie-joints, really—which attracted the soldiers. It was this environment which fueled my taste for absurd and offbeat news stories.
Photographers in those early years of the conflict hung out together in the hotel bars of Saigon. That’s how I met Larry Burrows, a British war-journalist who worked for Life magazine and was one of the most-awarded photographers to come out of the Vietnam war. Burrows helped me gain contacts in Saigon, both with the American military command and with the opposing factors. Without leads and the contacts you wouldn’t get “the story.”
It was because of Larry Burrows that I was one of only five photographers in Saigon who were privy to the intelligence-leak that a monk was about to commit suicide. An immolation was to occur in the early hours of June 11, 1963, at a compound outside Saigon in front of a few select journalists. The Bhuddist leaders orchestrating the sacrifice schemed that the global reaction to the front-page photos of the monk setting himself on fire would create an anti-war movement. The goal was to speed up peace negotiations.
At three in the morning, we photographers were rushed from the hotel out to the compound. The unlucky monk who had been selected for the sacrifice had already been drugged into a semi-comatose state and sat on the ground. As soon as the media were ready with their cameras, other monks poured petrol over the “victim,” and he was then set alight. We let our Nikon motordrives spin throughout the ordeal and the resulting pictures, mine included, created enormous impact and news coverage in all major newspapers around the world.
[EDIT 1/2/13: See comments below for Bob Arno’s elucidation on this experience.]
My first photo essay was from Pakistan where I shot the story on the Parsis and their infamous Towers of Silence. Their disposal of the dead isn’t so gruesome when you understand their belief in preserving the purity of fire, water, earth, and air. So as not to pollute these elements, they will not burn, bury, or sink their dead. Still, mine were morbid photos by an immature photographer. It wasn’t the historical perspective of the burial rituals which sold the story, but the stark and grisly images of vultures ripping limbs from human corpses.
In similar stark but shallow style, I photographed Hindu cremations at the burning ghats in Benares on the Ganges River, morning bathing rituals in the Ganges in Calcutta, opium dens in northern Thailand, the Bridge at River Kwaii, faith healers in the Philippines, and leper colonies in India.
One particular photo project had a strong impact on my career path. The story was on beggars and pickpockets accosting foreign visitors in Karachi. This was my introduction to a cynical distraction method based on sympathy and compassion. The pickpockets were lepers, and they were exploiting pity for profit.
In the early sixties leprosy was still a serious threat to the populations of India and Pakistan. It was common to see sufferers in various stages of deterioration roaming the streets of Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay, and New Delhi. Banding together, they often surrounded Western visitors coming out of banks, hotels, and churches. The sight of an outstretched hand with missing or rotting fingers usually caused people to react with horror and drop some coins, if for no other reason to get the infected limbs to go away. Compassion and revulsion metamorphosed into currency. The ploy was effective, diabolical, and unique to Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent.
My story showed a team of lepers who specialized in pickpocketing under the guise of begging. While one tugged at the left side of the mark and held out his diseased hand for baksheesh, his accomplice on the mark’s right fanned—softly felt for the wallet. When the victim looked left, aghast at the touch of such ravaged hands, his reaction would be a sudden jerk to the right to get away from the loathsome encounter. The partner on the right would lift his wallet in that moment of abrupt contact.
This was the most primitive of survival instincts, where rules of civility, shame, and respect didn’t apply. Just raw confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. I was only 22 years old when I first witnessed this subterfuge, and I was both stunned and fascinated. Stunned at the callousness of using the primeval emotion, fear, to accomplish distraction. Fascinated by the realization that there were people so desperate they would go to any extent to find money to survive for the next couple of days. It was a rude awakening for a youth raised in the privileged shelter of socialist Sweden.
Watching this base encounter is what inspired my lifelong effort to document, and to unravel, the mind-games which nearly always attend pickpocketing. I was intrigued by the fact that wit was as much a part of it as was technique. This is what challenged me to explore the criminal mind. Pickpocketing is not an activity that one only practices now and then. It’s a daily routine performed several times in a fairly short time span. It’s an intense crime based on dexterity and, equally important, on psychological analysis of the opponent. A good pickpocket must be able to read many signals and make an instant decision on whether to go for the poke or wait for a better opportunity.
I was also intrigued, in those early years, by the cleverness of the set-up. Although the theatrical theft of a wallet on stage is entirely different from lifting one in the street, the principles of distraction are the same. By studying the real thieves, I realized I could incorporate their techniques into my performance. I began a fanatical collection of stratagems, always on the lookout for the clever, devious, cunning, slick, duplicitous, ingenious, innovative, inventive, and creative new trick.
Much later in my career, exactly thirty years later, I would find that the lepers’ technique—begging on one side of a victim, pickpocketing on the other—was nearly identical to the methods used by thieving gangs in southern Europe today.
Another pivotal moment arrived for me that same year in India when I realized that gangs of beggars and pickpockets usually worked under controlling leaders. Not protectors or father-figures to homeless children, these leaders were brutal mutilators who intentionally crippled children in order to make them better beggars, allotted them territories, and demanded daily payments from them. My discovery of this grim reality was the spark that fired my quest to find, understand, and expose the manipulators’ deception.
From Indian beggars to east European gypsy families to American inner-city street toughs to North African pickpockets to Colombian tricksters, I have always asked this question: how did you learn your trade? Was it passed down within the family? Was it learned in prison? Was destitution the motivator?
For more than forty years a rumor has been whispered among police forces in America that an organized school for pickpockets exists. The School of the Seven Bells is said to graduate a certified pickpocket when he can steal from all the pockets of a man’s suit while it hangs on a mannequin, without ringing little warning bells tied to the clothes. A pickpocket in Cartegena told us that the school is nestled high in the mountains of Colombia. An American cop told us of a variation in Chicago, in which razor blades buried in the suit pockets replace the bells. And yet I have never spoken to a policeman who has succeeded in getting any detail from detained pickpockets about the school. Perhaps it is mere myth. My search continues.
One of the most common questions people ask me after they’ve seen my lecture or one of our documentaries on con games is how I got so interested in tracking criminals. The easy answer is that one thing led to another: stage pickpocketing to observing street thieves to adapting their tricks for the stage. But that denies the force of my own personality in steering my expedition through life. It’s far more difficult to define the eccentric quirk in my psyche that attracted me to deceit, deception, and double-dealing—but always on the right side of law and morality. I am fascinated by confidence games and have the great fortune to enjoy my interest as my career.
In my younger years, my trio of passions—travel, photography, and entertaining—seemed to be in conflict; I thought an inevitable choice would have to be made. Maybe I never grew up. I still travel the world non-stop and I still love it. I’m still deeply involved in photography, though it has mostly evolved into videography. And I am still a full-time entertainer working theaters and private corporate events around the world. I’m having a blast. How lucky can one man be?
