This Mumbai rap duo is dishing feel-good, yesteryear, fusion nostalgia

Classmates from Jamnabai Narsee School, Karan Kapadia and Adam Jai Malvi make up The Lotuseaters. Their latest, Tere Bina, is a love ballad in collaboration with Thai singer Rimi Nique. Pic/Ashish Raje

This is not the first time that we've heard Karan Kapadia rap. A year ago, we chanced upon an Instagram Reel of the actor, who is the son of late actress Simple Kapadia and nephew to Dimple Kapadia. Our fleeting attention span must have led us to the next Reel, because, when we meet Karan at a Juhu studio to discuss his latest single Tere Bina, we have little memory of the song. Karan, who has turned up in a white tee paired with black track pants, admits that his music has been a silent work-in-progress. So, he is a bit surprised too by how Tere Bina, which dropped online last week, has taken off. "We knew that it's one of our best, but we didn't anticipate this response," he says. His new-found fan is his actress aunt, who otherwise listens to Sufi singer Abida Parveen. A now viral video of Dimple, shared by daughter Twinkle Khanna, has her grooving to Karan's song. "She just loves it, and has been playing it on loop. We were at the doctor's the other day, and she even got him to hear it... I was so embarrassed," he laughs.

One half of The Lotuseaters duo, the 29-year-old has been making music for the last two years with friend and former schoolmate, Adam Jai Malvi. The beginnings of the project were not incident-free. "I was supposed to begin work on a web series when I tore my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] while playing football. I couldn't shoot; I was bedridden," shares Karan, who made his acting debut with Blank (2019) alongside Sunny Deol. "It was around this time that I started writing and messing around with beats on YouTube. I felt I was getting better at it, but I didn't know anyone in the music business who could help me."

The Lotuseaters duo Karan Kapadia and Adam Jai Malvi, both 29, studied at Jamnabai Narsee School together. Pic/Ashish Raje

On a whim, he reached out to his music producer friend Adam. The two were classmates at Jamnabai Narsee School, where he says, they were quite a handful. "No, it was worse! We were delinquents," clarifies Adam, who has joined us for the chat. Karan laughs at the inside joke: "Dude, what were we even thinking!" Their teenage years, they say, were wasted on all things silly and random - and strangely, music never figured in it, says Karan. At some point, the friends got busy in their separate careers. "I knew Adam was doing a lot of house and electronic music. So, I wrote to him asking, ‘Bro, are you still making beats?' Adam sent me a couple of beats, and there was a good vibe there... I actually managed to create something decent out of what he sent me."

The idea for the band's name, says Adam, came from the Greek legend of a mythical island inhabited by sailors and vagabonds who consumed the fruit of the lotus plant. "Those who ate the fruit forgot about returning home, and spent the rest of their days on the island... carefree," says Adam. When Karan tells us that he has begun to love rapping more than acting, and if given a chance he'd pursue music full-time, we think it's perhaps befitting for him to have joined this "lotus-eater tribe". "I was always a huge fan of [American rapper] Eminem. I had a knack for remembering lyrics. But, I never imagined that I would write my own song or rap to it. That was a discovery that happened post the injury," says Karan, who had his heart set on acting from a very young age. "If not acting, I thought I'd become a sports journalist."

The duo created an original slate of 15 songs, but chose to release a few. "That's because we are very critical of our work," says Karan. Their first two singles, released last year, didn't receive enough traction. Their third, Rastafarian, which came out in late April, set the ball rolling. "My friends are not yes-men... they are my harshest critics, to the point that it sometimes hurts. It was them who gave me the confidence to continue," says Karan. "But I think it's with Tere Bina that the movement actually began," feels Adam, adding, "I have seen a hell of a growth in Karan, and his drive and pro-activeness has made it fun."

Karan's rap comes from a personal space. "I write about relationships, whether it's with the partners I have had, my friends, or the things that I went through with my mum [Simple died of cancer in 2009]. I don't want to be a punch-line rapper. For me, it has to come from an authentic place." Tere Bina, where the duo has collaborated with artiste Rimi Nique, is a love ballad. "I am not a very expressive person in conversation... I find that writing is a helpful way of doing it." He says this gift of writing perhaps comes from his mother, whose verse he found on her Facebook account, a few months after her death, and later had it tattooed on his torso.

Adam says it's hard to describe their music in a single word. "It's more like feel-good, yesteryear, fusion nostalgia," he says, "And his rap lends to this naturally."
Karan will be seen next in Dhanbad, a web series scheduled to release later this year, and also starring Makarand Deshpande, Imaad Shah and Ayesha Jhulka. "But I continue to write pretty much everywhere... between shots, in the bathroom, in the hotel room. When you love something, you find the time for it," says Karan. "For the longest time, I thought acting was my calling. Don't get me wrong, I still love it... but with acting, I am saying lines that are given to me; here, I get to say what's on my mind. I do feel more naked with my music... you can't hide behind a character [like in films]. But it's a cathartic and fulfilling process."