He said he could tell a Bihari just by looking at his face.

This was a long time ago, barely a year after I had bought a Rs 110 ticket in Patna to board North-east Express to come to Delhi to find a job and hopefully begin a new life.

He was a Punjabi friend of a Punjabi friend of mine. He ran a shop that washed cars and filled oils in them. We had gathered at our friend’s place to celebrate his birthday and the birthday boy, who was also my boss then, told the face-recognition master how I did not look like a Bihari. “Oh, he does,” the businessman said, raising his hand in an announcement of certain knowledge. “I can tell a Bihari in a second.”

I did not know how one could. I still don’t. And my boss was perhaps too decent to have such acute forensic skills.

This skill, I noticed over the next several years till I left India in 1999, was quite common to the ‘native’ citizens of Delhi. Some had refined it to the extent that they could tell a Bihari from a human from, say, Madhya Pradesh or Orissa.

A Bihari, it turned out, was dark-skinned (like most Indians), thin (like most poor people), sported a moustache (like most Indian men) and spoke a version of Hindi heavily influenced by his local dialects (like most north Indians). But a Bihari was also seen to have crude manners and was nearly always found doing menial jobs, keeping gates in Gulmohar Park, pulling rickshaws in Patparganj and washing chhole-kulche plates in Nehru Place.

... contd.