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An Indian street juggler

by Lloyd Timberlake - London, England.

London: Balraj Nagishetty does not know how long his ancestors have been street jugglers, certainly as far back as anyone in the family can remember. Each has done the same act, using the same props; Balraj's knives are 40 years old and belonged to his father.

But 24-year-old Balraj may be the last of his line. He wants his children to go to school, "and once they go to school they will not want to juggle," he said.

Balraj, his wife, 5-year-old daughter and 2year-old son live in the village of Antargram, a place of 400 families in the state of Andhra Pradesh, east-central India. The family stays in the village during the rains and for the harvest, but for six months of the year they travel, with another couple and their child, around India.

Ranging mostly north, where India tends to be richer, they have been to Delhi., to Calcutta and the villages along the Bangladesh border and even to Bombay, the Hollywood of India, where Balraj once found a few hours work as a film extra. But most of their time is spent in the central states of Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. They mostly walk, sleeping at night in a small tent.

Balraj's travelling companion "plays the drum and is a very good talker. When he talks, people get caught and cannot leave, even if they do not like what I am doing just then. When he plays the drum, people walking many streets away know that a show of some kind is happening and they come running."

The drum is a "Dholak" - narrow at both t ends and thick in the middle, played at both , ends. The show lasts about 45 minutes. Some of it is the sort of thing Westerners think of as the tricks of the Indian "fakir," rather than juggling. Balraj sticks a curved wire, the consistency of a coat hanger, into a nostril and pulls it out his mouth, rattling it loudly against his teeth. It is a variation on the yoga cleansing exercise done with cotton. He lifts a 100kilo (22-pound) stone with his eyelid, by hanging it from a wire attached to a small metal, monocle-like circle.

Yet his most bizarre move is to clutch a small, hard pebble with his lip against the bottom of his nose. He then throws, very accurately and very straight, a glass marble some 10 meters (35 feet) into the sky. He holds his face beneath it as it falls, letting it shatter into fragments against the pebble on his face.

He tried the trick on a London rooftop, throwing the marble so high he lost it in the grey sky on his first few attempts. He then shattered a few and said, "It is much easier under the blue skies of India. I can throw them really high there. "