Rishi Keish-Hirwe
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Oh, that's nice.
I like it that she has all of this luxury around her and she shares it with her family.
Yeah. Yeah. The sensitivity level is turned all the way up.
That's just exhausting to think about. It's exhausting just to hear.
I don't know that I've ever had 11 of anything. I have four plates. Yeah. I have four plates.
I think that I've been conditioned to be stressed out by gossip from birth. My family's Indian, and my mom had a real sort of what would the community think aspect to, I don't know, the way that she raised my sister and myself.
P-S-A-N-D-A-G-O. Yeah, that makes sense. Because when you're traveling, you can do things that you wouldn't normally otherwise do.
Did I eat seven desserts when I was in London in two days? Yes. Different rules.
Okay. Is that a prediction or just advice?
And what's the age difference here between like how old is the eldest son at this point?
Man. Well, the whole thing stresses me out. Again, just to think about my own upbringing, because my mom, when I was a baby, she was at somebody's house and there was another person visiting there. And that person was like, oh, you just had a baby. Do you want me to do their astrological chart? Because astrology is really big in India.
And I think my mom was like, yeah, sure. So in any case, this woman did this whole astrological thing where.
Yeah, a reading and like told my mom all this stuff about my life.
And my mom and I don't know how old I was when my mom told me first told me this story. I think a teenager or something like that. But my mom started to tell me this and I was like, I don't want to hear it. Don't tell me anything that she said at all. Please never talk to me about this. I have no interest in this. In fact, I have like an active interest in never hearing this again.
I have never seen a psychic. It's true. And you know what else? I don't watch trailers for movies. As with movies, as in life, I will experience it when the time comes.
Exactly. No, my business is right now. Does this feel like it relates to the gossip thing? Absolutely. I don't want the people at the beginning of the movie to be telling me about the movie behind the movie's back. I wait outside.
No, I wait outside until the trailers are over and then I go sit down. Yeah.
Well, now, you know, you can you can buy your seats ahead of time, which was such a gift for me. Right. So. So, yeah, I will just hang out and then, you know, I like sort of poke my head in. And now there are all these long kind of featurettes between the trailers and the thing where you have Nicole Kidman saying, you know, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
You know, just making sure that you don't give any fodder to this sort of... vague idea of an outside world so that they might have something bad to say about you. You also don't want to be too showy or look too good because you don't want people to give you the evil eye. But you just need to ride a sort of somewhere in the high middle where people will talk about
And so that's my cue to go sit down.
I've read enough Greek mythology. I don't trust prophecies.
Yeah. They move. She really trusted this psychic.
But wait, but what about the third prediction? Did they follow that last one?
Yeah, it's stressful. But I think I, the reason why I don't want to hear about the future and don't want to hear about prophecies is because they scare me too much. It sounds like my life is really ruled by fear. And maybe I guess it is. I'm just coming to learning this about myself. But I because I think I respect them too much.
You know, I'm I'm too scared of the idea of like if this is what is supposed to happen and you try and either thwart it. Are you going to head into disaster or are you going to somehow find yourself fulfilling the thing that you're trying to avoid?
But never any like never, never got a psychic that gave her anything good or just nothing that came true or just simply wasn't able to find a psychic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You will meet a mysterious stranger.
This is an epic story. So we we're spanning. This must be close to a century.
No weird prophecy related tragedies.
And were she and Allegra close?
I wish I had that. I want to have, I mean, I really love my aunts and I really enjoy spending time with them. And I'd love, like when we do all hang out, that is my information gathering period. You know, my sister and I will just be like, tell us about this and tell us about that. But none of our aunts or uncles live anywhere close to us.
Most of them for most of our life, you know, they didn't live in this country. So that sounds really nice.
Did she continue to live in Maria's house?
Oh, how good you are at school and where you ended up going to college, but not so much that people will give you the evil eye and not so badly that people will be like, did you hear about their daughter?
You know, I don't actually know how old my dad is.
Yeah. He might be one year older than or younger than what he is because sometimes in India they would just send kids off to school to just like get them out the house and go, you know, because he's one of seven kids. Yeah, sure. And so I think there's a chance that they might have said that he was a year older than he was so that he could start school. And now nobody has any way of verifying.
So I like this very much.
At this point, it's moot.
Oh, my gosh. You can't just be like, yeah, fine. You're the government. OK, fine. We'll go with 94.
Oh, man. I mean, do they know where she was born?
You know, even without the actual birth certificate, maybe there's other kinds of records that you can access, like at a hospital or something like that, if you know the hospital.
High school graduation documents.
And both of them are handwritten.
That's, uh, this is juicy.
Yeah, just thinking about, you know, like the way names are changed at Ellis Island. You know, just the way that like one person who might have been sleepy, one social security, newly minted social security worker might have not had their coffee that morning. And the way a four might look. I'm just thinking about all the ways that things could go wrong with the system.
You know, I don't even think that the term gossip was really used. It was just the way that people talked about each other. But sometimes that information would be good and sometimes that information would be negative.
I don't think so. I don't think that, especially at that time, it would be lying about a child's age. In my imagination of this, it's the grand matriarch and she's giving the information. And, you know, like a proud mom might say, these are my children and these are their ages. And you would just tell the truth. You would just say, yeah, I have these 11 kids and here's how old they are.
Oh, and it's about your own age.
But then would you not think of that as your escape route? Yeah, like to be like, hey, look, government document backs us up. I'm only 28. Yeah. But then she continued to say 99. So I don't think the error lies on the family's part.
And I was just deathly afraid of anybody saying anything negative about me in a way that I find, you know, like I can joke about it a little bit, but I actually think that it had serious kind of crippling ramifications for me as an adult and for me as like a professional and creative person.
Yeah, how do you hit pause to be like, I need a lot more than that.
I feel like a bad relative. But yes, I think that she's just being dramatic. From everything that I know, all the time that I've spent with Aunt Julia, I feel like she's an unreliable narrator when it comes to statements like these.
Oh my gosh, Kelsey, I just remembered the seed that you have planted however many minutes ago. Now I'm full of dramatic tension.
I'm not on TikTok yet. Maybe I will be someday. But but I remember that people were posting all these like aged up pictures of themselves.
Yeah. I mean, and especially I think as a musician, as a songwriter, it's really hard.
Okay. Okay. I mean, could be, could be fine. Sometimes familial relations, you know, whatever. There's, yeah, who knows? Sure.
I mean, again, genetics are weird. I'm I'm not on board with any conspiracy theory yet. Yet.
I've only recently kind of come to appreciate how much distance I feel between the world of like punk rock and rock and roll and this kind of like, who cares, you know, middle finger to the air kind of attitude that is, I think represents so much of what people love about that kind of music and where that music comes from.
But what what's her theory?
Yes. They said to move houses. Mm-hmm. you were going to be pregnant by the end of the year. And your eldest son needed to postpone his wedding until after the baby was born.
48 years old. Yes. Right.
And what does the mom say? She's never considered this possibility.
At the wedding, right.
Right, right. Wow. Okay, but I'm still a little bit unsure how this plays into the age change.
And to try and take this kind of, I'm just trying to be a good boy in school, nobody say anything bad about me and turn that into like some kind of musical persona that is exciting for people to listen to. Yeah, exactly.
Oh, I mean, she could be, but certainly it would be then a different kind of story. Yeah.
Yeah. Even if she's not the one doing the lying, like this is a conspiracy between her and her mom. So there's a concerted narrative that they're presenting. And so regardless of who's answering the door for the Social Security person, they could say, here's the story that we're telling and we're sticking to it.
I do buy it. Yeah, I buy it. And my heart breaks for everybody. For Julia never being able to be the mom to her son, for Allegra never to get to relate to her as her great-grandmother, it feels very tragic to me.
Wow. A nice pun there.
Is San Diego even a place?
Oh, the letter D?
Wow. That's a real clue. That's more than a clue.
I forgot about the moving part. I was so excited about the discovery of Diego. They had to keep them apart. For me, then, you have to track down Diego, right? Does she try and find out who Diego is?
Well, it sounds great. Why would they have to move away?
First of all, I was riveted. I would absolutely watch this prestige drama. I'm imagining the period piece costumes and it's just great. Thank you so much for letting me hear this story because I loved it. Thank you. Great. Wow. So exciting. I please bring me back for the sequel when we find Diego. When we get I need to complete my red string board here of genealogy.
Yeah, I'm on the side of the truth. And I don't care who I have to go through to get it.
Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Because those are facts.
Oh, beautiful. And a tragedy. I mean, just poor Diego and Julia.
But I also love a tragedy. So.
Thank you so much for having me. This was really an epic saga. And thanks for, you know, therapizing me a little bit about my relationship with the concert.
Okay. Yeah. Like, I think that's when you're talking about somebody. Yeah, matchmaking. Exactly. That is the best kind of gossip because you're doing it with the aim of benefiting all the parties involved.
Exactly. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. And so I will be quiet for the rest of you.
Welcome to Kelsey's monologue.
Well, I was thinking about my love of matchmaking and where that might have come from. Yeah. And there's a very obvious answer, I think, which is that my parents had an arranged marriage.
And that's kind of, you know, the ultimate blind date. Yes. You know, they had went on one date and got married.
Exactly. You know, it worked out for them. They were married for 49 years. My mom passed away a few years ago, but they were married for 49 years. They had a wonderful, strange marriage that that was my certainly like primary understanding of what a family looks like. But it all started with with an arranged marriage. And so I love the idea that somebody put them together.
You know, like there's somebody out there who I've never met.
And I was asking my dad recently to fill in some of the details like I knew that they had been. I kind of know the story from when they first met that like first meeting, but I didn't really know how they got there.
And so does this count as a gossip story?
So my dad told me recently his version of this story. There is one person really at the at the center of the marriage. His name is Shrikashen Bagade.
And I'd heard this name, Bagade, before, you know. And so I was like, can you tell me about him? Like, who was this person? Was it a whole family? He said, oh, well, my father, so my grandfather on my dad's side, used to tutor people in math. He was a math teacher, but he used to also do, like, you know, tutoring. And Sri Kishen Bagade was one of the people that he tutored.
And I was like, oh, okay, so that's how you met him. He was my dad's student. And then later, actually, when I was older, when I was in school, he tutored me in math. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. How come your dad didn't just tutor you in math?
And he said, yeah. And he said, oh, well, you know, he was older and I was at this school and it was closer for me to just go to his house and get tutored by him. And I was like, wow, that's so cool that this person who your dad tutored then ended up becoming your tutor. And my dad's like, yeah, also he's also, you know, my cousin.
How is that not the? And so then it turns out it's my, you know, he's my dad's first cousin. He's the son of my dad's sister. So, yeah, these are the kinds of details that emerge much later. Yeah. When my dad went to the US to get his PhD, he was studying there and he was in grad school. He got permission from his professor, the one who ran the lab where he worked.
My dad was studying food science. He got permission to go back to India for 30 days. And my dad thought he would go and, you know, try and look for a job for post-graduation. Okay. And so he sent his resume to his family and said, like, can you please, you know, just like pass this around and see if there's anybody that is hiring.
Also, if you happen to know of any suitable, you know, marriage prospects, I'd also be open to that.
Meanwhile, my mom, 24 years old, had just finished her master's degree in literature. She went home to her dad's place, her mom and dad's place, in a town called Osmanabad. And at that time, Bagade uncle was working there as an engineer. An adult working and... He went with his boss, who was the, I guess, like, executive engineer of the city or some kind of something.
And my mom's dad was a judge. So there was some kind of level of, you know, city official friendship. I don't know. They were having some kind of party or gathering at their house. And Bugatti uncle went with his boss to my mom's father's house. And they were all talking and his boss asked my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, oh, you know, how's your family?
I think I heard your daughter just finished school. How's she doing? And my grandfather said, yeah, you know, she's good. She's good. We're trying to find somebody for her. It's been a little tough. My mom was very picky. And this was true even then. Picky about everything. And so they were having a little bit of a hard time finding somebody that would work.
So then Bugatti uncle and his boss leave the party. And right as they're leaving... Um, they haven't gone far at all, according to my dad. And then, um, he says to his boss, you know, actually I know somebody, uh, maybe I, would it be okay? I, I actually have this, uh, cousin or maybe he called him his former two T. Yeah.
And they went back to the house and I was like, oh, the next day he's like, oh, no, no, no. They hadn't really gone far yet. So they just turned back around. So same day, same night, they turn back around and go back in and say, actually, we know somebody who comes from a good family. He's a nice guy. He's coming back to the U.S. in a couple weeks or whenever it was going to be, soon.
He was coming back to the U.S. And so then my grandfather the next day went on a pre-Google deep dive of my dad and tried to do all the research that he could about the Hereway family and... Oh my... And then they... They met my dad at the Bugatti's house when he came to visit. That was sort of like neutral territory, I guess.
Right. It's like, yeah, I have a resume slash dating profile right here.
Yeah, they met my dad at the Bugatti house. So my dad was in India for 30 days. By the end of those 30 days, they were married.
I couldn't get that information, but we've got less than three weeks to work with.
High stakes first date. But gossip was a necessary component to this whole thing happening.
Yeah, it's true. I think that can't be denied. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm scared, but I'm ready.
Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
All right. Can I take notes?
I've already put her in the wrong place.
I'm feeling a little stressed right away, but excited still.
I feel like part of my stress is definitely because of the topic of this podcast.