Horse’s eggs. Or ghorar deem, as the bhadrolok would say when confronted with something entirely nonsensical. It’s a phrase avant garde dancer Astad Deboo recalls bang in the middle of juggling rehearsals and recalcitrant dancers, mocking babus and parsimonious sponsors.

After so many years, you would think it would have got better for the performer who turns 60 this year. He’s been dancing for 54 years, 39 of those professionally. You would think, Deboo smiles resignedly.

We are at a window-side table in a mall’s self-service café in Mumbai on a quiet afternoon. A pigeon taps on the thin ledge outside. Deboo walks back carrying the coffee tray, with a loping walk and easy affability. “I have danced on such a thin ledge, in Spain. I have no fear of heights,” he says.

After a hiatus of four years, this contemporary dancer is performing his new work in India. Audiences in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai are finally getting to see the complete version of what was a short successful sequence in the October 2006 Frankfurt Book Festival, which had an India focus. Sometimes, that’s how long it takes to get a slice of India back home. Welcome to Astad Deboo’s world.

‘Rhythm Divine’ was born of Deboo’s periodic visits to Manipur over 11 years. While the world is his stage, his home city, Mumbai, has been stingy with its invitations. “I have been told by corporates and babus you will only get recognition posthumously. Why do you persist?”

Rarity and that fine pairing of derisive babudom and miserly marketers are enough to drive Deboo to tears, literally. Especially on days when a patronising sponsor rips Deboo’s budget to shreds and then tries to squeeze in an extra performance in Chennai. The next sponsor refuses to share poster space with the first sponsor. “Ghorar deem paabey,” snorts Deboo, you’ll get nothing.

His latest work is a collaborative effort with eight Pung Cholam drummers, members of the Imphal-based Guru Sietyaban’s ensemble Govindaji Nat Sankirtan. Pungs are classical drums used in social and religious ceremonies. ‘Rhythm Divine’ gathers tempo slowly to end in a flying crescendo and in the choreographer’s words is almost spiritual.

Yet the form demands hard work. “I keep saying, if it doesn’t kill you, then you are no good. I don’t design soothing dance pieces — I don’t like them. I like art to have some raw earthy quality. We try to bring into their drumming a rhythmic pattern that disciplines, and unleashes the parallels between two forms, two styles,” says Deboo.

As a child, did he ever feel like Billy Elliot, the coal miner’s boy who wanted to learn ballet? Deboo laughs heartily. “This Billy Elliot had one thing on his side: parents who were supportive from the outset,” says the man who calls himself a Tata Steel boy. His father was a senior finance officer in Jamshedpur where Deboo studied in Loyola School and grew up, sandwiched between two sisters.

Deboo learnt Kathak in Jamshedpur from the age of six. His parents were Parsis with old values, and more assimilated than their perceivably more Westernised counterparts in other cities. “They were always very proud of me. Even when they saw the great struggle to get a platform here there never was any pressure to give up dance,” recalls Deboo.

Instead his parents apologised for not being well connected enough to make his struggle slight. Baba was proud as only fathers can be of their sons getting the first Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1995 at Rashtrapati Bhawan. And Ma was as misty eyed as mothers are wont to be when the President conferred their 59-year-old with the Padma Shri.

The only time they told him to take a break from dance was when he went to Mumbai to study economics. “I played along. Then when the urge to dance became a passion, I told Baba, Na. I had to get out,” he says.

A performance by the American Murray Lewis Dance Company was his eureka moment, marking the beginning of a search for his own method. “It was a totally new form of movement and approach to space. The vocabulary of dance was so different from Indian classical,” he explains.

On May 23, 1969, Deboo took the last boat out of India before the monsoons began. “I knew I had to get out,” he emphasises after all these years. He left India without a visa aboard a cargo ship bound for Khorramshahr, Iran, with a permission form for deckhands who travelled more or less “with sheep and vegetables. It’s like labourers going to the Gulf now.”

It was the beginning of an eight-year 35-country backpacking journey, although he never made it to New York, his original destination. Instead, he travelled and studied dance, hitching rides, “thumb zindabad!,” picking up seven languages and dancing his way through France, Japan, Spain, South America, Canada, Taiwan and Korea. Only in London did he have to wash dishes. It lasted a week. In Tokyo he was sometimes an English teacher, sometimes a host in a women’s bar.

For the rest, he survived by his art, and began to develop his own dance style. He has performed in locations such as the Great Wall of China, Mount Wyna Picchu, near Machu Picchu in Peru, and Champaner near Baroda, where enthralled farmers at the end of the performance asked what it all meant.

Today, his calendar is busy till 2010. This year alone he will perform in Oslo, Stuttgart, Hong Kong, Madrid, Singapore and the US. An upcoming project for 2011 will see him collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art on Amir Khusro’s works. He is out of the country more than 250 days a year.

And yet, the question “So where are you in your journey?” can be heartbreaking. “I want my work to be seen in India. Everyone says you are so lucky. You go here and there. No one realises how one has to slog, slog and slog. There is no such thing as a commissioned work. You may have a name, goodwill but with each production you start all over again, trying for sponsors.”

‘Rhythm Divine,’ he adds, has eight instead of 20 drummers because of budget constraints. “Things have not got any better. It’s an art performance, not a popular performance. But sponsors can be very mercenary. Even the enlightened CEOs: they say darun kaaj korchho (you are doing great work). I say if so, then give me money. When the time comes, they pass the buck,” he says wearily.

He can write a book on what babus have said. Like the secretary of culture who said maliciously, “Mr Deboo, you will get recognition posthumously.”

Or the CEO, who remarked, “You know, Astad, I have been supporting you on and off. And if you still haven’t been able to stand on your feet then you should think of giving up. Do something else.” What was Deboo’s response? “Ki bolbo? Sahib log der ki bolbo? (What can I say to a Sahib?),” says Deboo who learnt his Bengali in Jamshedpur and Calcutta.

“It can be so frustrating. I was so angry, pained. The things I have to hear…,” his voice trails off. “No one understands my passion for my work,” he murmurs almost inaudibly.

Moments later, he is more composed. “I work alone. My work is my life. That is the situation.” A peripatetic life has left little time for long-term relationships. Instead, school friends, his artist collaborators and family are his emotional bulwark.

He refuses to give in to the cynics. And several Tata group companies and ITC Hotels have kept faith. Audience response is also encouraging.

In the Oscar-winning Polish film The Lives of Others, a blacklisted writer asks despairingly: What can a writer do if he cannot write, or an actor can’t act?

“What can a dancer do if he cannot dance,” echoes Deboo, raising a shoulder. “Setbacks have not deterred me. For my work has to be seen. And I have worked so hard at it. I cannot say this is enough. Not yet.”

The naysayers can go suck eggs.