Meet RJ
August, 2021
“So, you work to survive, you don't work to win. You don’t work to like, earn, earn, earn. That's the difference between you and me, on that note. When I came to this country, I said ‘This paycheck is not enough for me. This paycheck is not enough for me, this paycheck is not.’ I'm hungry. I'm looking for the next step.”
The next step, it turns out, is to open a restaurant, and RJ was well on his way. When he moved here from New Delhi in 2015, he was driven to learn more about cooking and grow as a chef.
“I looked at the culinary programs here,” he says. “I thought, what's my availability or what are the things that I could do here? It just fascinated me because I was restricted in so many norms back home. It's just like beef is not allowed, pork’s not allowed, alcohol is not allowed. Then I thought, how the fuck am I able to grow when I have to cook with all those ingredients in the future? You have to use the ingredients, then why am I not learning enough?”
I was curious why he’d chosen Toronto, Canada, for his culinary renaissance.
He shrugs. “Every Indian's dream is to go to Canada. Who fucking knows? It's cool.”
We were in his brightly lit, waterfront apartment, sipping whiskey at his kitchen counter and admiring his view of the city on a nearly perfect cloudless day. He’d worked hard to get to this point in his life, and in his career, and he now seemed comfortable in his routine and happy with his lifestyle. Despite the hard work, he says he never worried about his CV, focusing instead on learning whatever he wanted. Toronto, he thought, was a good place for self-discovery.
“Toronto is faster, so much faster,” he explains to me. “Even now I want to invest in the GTA, it’s the fastest growing economy. Why put the numbers behind when they matter the most? I like the freedom here, and the acceptance of the rebel nature. I've always been rebellious about the things I wanted to do, and I've never seen such acceptance anywhere else.”
“What don't you like about Toronto?” I ask him.
“Busy, it's so fucking busy. People running all the time.”
“But aren't you busy?”
“I'm part of Toronto.”
Fair enough.
“I used to work the same job for cents,” he goes on, “so why wouldn't I do it for major dollars? There's no harm in being busy. It’s something which I don't like, but it's not that bad. But I've seen it before. I was stuck in traffic for four hours, nothing new.” Although he’s assimilated quickly to this fast-paced lifestyle, I wanted to know about his early days here. I ask him if he experienced culture shock when he first arrived.
“The white chicks walking in short dresses,” he tells me. “I was walking on King Street, so many fucking hot chicks walking down the road, I was like, ‘wow.’”
“Wait, that was your culture shock? You haven’t seen that before?”
He gives me an incredulous look. “Back home, are you serious? Never. You’ve been to Delhi yourself, haven’t you? Have you seen any white chicks walking in a skirt there?”
He makes an excellent point.
So, he’s been busy, and surrounded by women in short dresses. It could be worse. His only real complaint is Canada’s infamous weather. He’s not even bothered by the people, who he says are “fucking fantastic.” We’ve talked in the past about the racism he’s endured, and I ask him about it again now.
“Toronto is not racist,” he says simply. “No, I would have never got this opportunity that I have today, if Toronto was racist. I've never faced racism that I cannot handle. They shit-talk around the globe, why are we pinpointing on a city which has offered so much? I have so many friends from different cultures. What does that say about it? If we were racially fucked up, then we will be only between whites and colors. We're not living in that era anymore, are we?”
Although he’s endured his share of discrimination, he’s also had people come to his defense. And he suffers fools gladly, amused by their ignorance.
“People have said, ‘Hey! You can't eat pork.’ I said why? ‘Because you’re Muslim.’ I'm like ‘Thank you, fuck, nobody told me that’.”
RJ is driven to push boundaries and expectations professionally as well. “My company is called Brown Truffle. It's a take. My boss called me racist, I said ‘a) brown truffle is the rarest truffle that you can find, and b) I’m here to tell them I'm fucking expensive.’ That’s my logic. Truffle is one of the most expensive things that you can cook from when you cook. And I'm fucking brown. I'm changing things that I want to change. So that's why I call it Brown Truffle Incorporation, because I fucking change what I want to change regardless of what you think. I fuck with them when I want to. It’s that simple, right?”
RJ’s unceasing drive has enabled his success in a relatively short period. “I used to go back to my college and just tell them, ‘hey, you fuckers, you're able to afford all of this because we paid twice the [tuition] of what you fucking deserve.’ I was so honest about it. I was like ‘hey what do you got, a full fucking cow? I'll cook it.’ That's my privilege. I need to cook it. Well, things like that, I was very vocal. You've seen me.”
The sun is lower in the sky when we decide to move to RJ’s rooftop for some photos, but not before he refills my glass of whiskey. Upstairs, we get an amazing 360 view of Toronto: the city on one side, meeting the water on the other. The blue sky appears to be fading into the lake, and the city sounds of traffic and people feel far away. Drink still in hand, RJ tells me about how important is to keep learning and growing as a person, a process which led him to Toronto and kept him here.
“If you're left without a business, that's what's happening back home. The economies are crashing and people who are my friends and my family, they don't know what the fuck they want to do because they never gained any skill. If you go to a nine to five job, you learn a nine to five job. They didn't expand because they thought that they were secure. I came here, I learned new things. It's not just cooking, I’ve learned music, I aspire to learn more. I want to learn Salsa. So that hunger for learning only comes when you need it. It won't be there forever.”
“They don’t know what the fuck they want to do because they never gained any skill. If you go to a nine to five job, you learn a nine to five job. They didn’t expand because they thought that they were secure. I came here, I learned new things. It’s not just cooking, I’ve learned music, I aspire to learn more.”
“But maybe there’s happiness in staying still,” I point out. Not everyone cares to be constantly moving forward.
“Ya, and they die,” he says frankly. “They buy Tim Horton's coffee; they go to fucking lunch at Swiss Chalet. They play a hockey game in between, I mean don't get me wrong there.”
Couldn’t he have grown and changed at home as well? I wanted to know. What difference does a change of scenery do? I’d been worried for a while that this restless pursuit of new places to live could be driven by avoidance, to keep starting over rather than waiting and trying in what’s now.
“Do you believe in the Kingdom’s rule?” He asks me. “Like if a king is born, the king's son gets his throne and the guy after. So, everybody [back home] is living a prince dream. I‘m not joking. Everybody is like a prince to their dad. Dads are the ones who are hard working. So, I rejected that in order to be where I am. I chose a trade which was not even respected by my family, they still sometimes do not respect it. I tell them, ‘hey, you know what? I'm fucking making more than anybody who's over there right now and I’ll fucking make much more than anybody can think of in the next 10 years.’ That keeps me hungry. So what's wrong with it? That’s giving me motivation to tell them: fuck you. Yeah, it's the biggest pleasure of your life that you can ever have. Show it by your game. Don’t talk, do it by your work.”
It's tough for me to imagine RJ in his home environment, a prince inheriting his father’s throne. I only know this version of him: driven, independent. “Do you feel like living here has made you a different person?” I ask him.
“Yep. I can never talk to my friends back home. Our ideologies do not match anymore. Our thought processes do not. This place has grown me. It has made me work for my dollar. It has made me work for everything and anything that I do. I didn't have a job back home. I was surviving on $300 pocket money, which was enough. Everything paid, you get fucking $300, the expenses are not that high. That used to last, until you start dating, then you go out to fucking expensive restaurants, start paying for somebody else. There's no split culture back home. You gotta pay a lady’s bill. So, when that happens, then you think, ‘fuck me, I need to get a job which pays me at least double or triple my pocket money.’”
I tell him that sounds kind of great.
“It was awesome.” He admits. “There, I grew up because of my family. But here, I'm growing up as a person, because of me. You know what I mean? It’s two different things. You take what's given to you.”
“Do you have any regrets, leaving home?” I ask.
“Nope. As for this minute, where I am right now and what I’ve gained, zero.”
The sun is starting to set now, a light pink coloring the horizon over the water. The city has begun to shine, lights slowly turning on in the nearby buildings, their glow competing with the fading sun. Our whiskeys are warm on the rooftop table.
I ask him what he misses about home, and if he thinks he’d ever move back.
“[I miss] everything. My family, my friends. People I used to sit and drink with, you know? But I'm not going back. I hope so. As for now and today, I think I have enough goals for the next 10 years in this country, in Canada. Back home, it’s bad economics, no growth. I miss my parents, obviously, but then I don't want to go back there and be another hand that they have to feed. I know what I'm capable of, and to leave everything and go back to a place where they don’t give a fuck? It doesn't add up. It’s so negative, they don't want you to grow. They want to push you down.”
“They didn’t expand because they thought that they were secure. I came here, I learned new things...So that hunger for learning only comes when you need it. It won’t be there forever. ”
We grab our cups and head back down to his apartment in the last of the light, our conversation bouncing off the walls of the narrow stairwell. RJ’s experience abroad sounds overwhelmingly positive, so my next question feels quite obvious. Does he think other people should live away from home?
“Absolutely,” he nods decisively. “Trust me, you learn nothing [at home].”
And when did he feel at home in Toronto? I wanted to know. He thinks about it a second before answering. “Paying my taxes.”
Welcome to Canada.
