I run into Neil Anand –– hip-hop artist “Aviator” –– on the B Line train heading east one evening in February. We’ve met once at an event for Base Trip Records, back when he was part of The Throwbacks, back when he was just Neil, and we occasionally say “hi” when we cross paths. But now we’re at the Packard’s Corner stop and I’m just leaning against a door listening to music when I see him barreling on. He’s holding a Poland Spring bottle and grinning.

That’s what we’ve been doing when we see each other, just grinning, you know, and passing, and that’s it. But this time? He’s Aviator this time. He stops, reeling.

He begins a breathy depiction of his evening what he’s been drinking (clear, but not water) how much he’s been writing (nonstop) how long he’s been awake (days) and what his label expects the next day (seven new tracks), and he just seems really––

And he IS really. Jeans wrapped tight around each slender leg, leather sneakers tapping toe-deep into the floor while fingers grip handholds then release to hook belt loops then tap thighs as he talks.

It’s a dilemma that will later show up in the song “Number One For Life,” the lyrics of which unfurl like, “This is just one I still need six songs / ‘Fore management hits me up on my Samsung / says, ‘We need more, keep doing work” / Little do they know this is more like giving birth.”

But tonight on the train he decides to rap something else for me –– just unwound enough. It’s a tipsier version of his cut “Bring Nick Back,” an homage to the carefree days of the early nineties: “Hey dude we would buy Moon Shoes / and you can tell Kel I love orange soda too.”

His voice ­–– which, on his recordings sounds slick and smooth –– is, on the train, low and restrained, slurring a little bit even though he hits each and every little rhyme just so, leaning in toward me and palming each word before waving it off with a fluid hand.

That night, it was the T, and in a few weeks it’d be the House of Blues to open for Kid Cudi and a few weeks after that –– right about now –– it’s off to New York City to set up in Westchester to begin a career on Wall Street. It’s a mixed bag of tricks for a recent college graduate, a rising hip-hop artist, a young sophisticate. But Anand is no stranger to wearing irony on his sweatshirt sleeve.

“You tryna tell me that I’m not like them / no duh…”

Anand’s a self-proclaimed man of distinctive tastes, but not without his trusty Converse. He graduated Boston University with a sociology degree and now works in the stock market, he’s an Indian who produces hip-hop and his real name is Neil, but by now, most students at his alma mater know him as Aviator. He loves Sour Patch Kids but also, fine cuisine.

“Belgian ales,” he says. “And deep, jammy merlots. Right now, I’m really into oysters.”

Contrast that with the title of his first official album release, a mixtape entitled Thank You, Come Again –– a cheeky nod to the stereotypical Indian take-out food adage.

The strange combinations, says Anand, make him the artist he is: “I put on rock shows with rap music.”

“[He] is an anomaly. He dresses well, more GQ than Rolling Stone, but can still be as uninhibited as a little kid,” Dory Greenberg, Anand’s close friend and a writer for undergroundhiphop.com, corroborates. “He’s brown, with parents straight out of India, but when people who have never seen him hear him, they can’t quite figure out what he is.”

But isn’t it all about irony, right ripped from the pages of the likes of Asher Roth and Sam Adams? Aviator might say so. And so would his Wall Street alter-ego, Anand.

Because if Wall Street is about “waking up at 6:30 in the morning, [and] suiting up,” as he says, then the NYC hip-hop circuit is about anything but. All of which, says Anand, is really working out.

“I come home with music and art every day,” he says. “The momentum from my day lingers into my nights.”

Responds an onlooker –– Anand’s girlfriend of two years –– Christina Putz, “He seems to be motivated by his struggle; working on Wall Street is not easy, I can tell you that from experience, but he is totally smart and really quick, and I’m sure that comes from years as a rapper.”

Putz, a dancer with lox-colored skin and hair like fire, could be seen as another foil for Anand, whose coffee-colored swagger seems an unlikely pairing to Putz’s ballerina’s temperament. The two met over their mutual dislike for the sociology class they shared two years ago, and they got closer, says Putz, because of their differences.

“When we first met we swapped music like crazy,” she recalls. “Because our tastes were so different.”

But a dichotomy came to favor them together, as well as him independently, she says.

“He always has to think ahead about what people are going to like or not going to like,” says Putz. “I’m sure his two jobs seem strange, but I also think in that way they compliment each other.”

Greenberg adds, “As far as his ‘double life,’ I think it’s only more creative juice for him.  If his life were all peachy-keen with no struggle, his successes wouldn’t be valued as much.”

“People that have heard my music and haven’t met me before are always surprised to find that I’m well-traveled, well-mannered, polite, compassionate and open-minded,” Anand says. “And I’m always like, ‘Why didn’t you think I would be that way? Is it because I’m a rapper?’”

Well–– yes. But after a little while with him, one learns that he’s not about stereotypes. He’s about food, style, business, his girlfriend, hip-hop.

“So one couldn’t classify me as a political rapper, or crunk rapper, or emo/hipster-hop, that Indian guy, or whatever,” he says. “I wear many hats. I’m a human being.”

“They call him Aviator cuz he’s lifting up the plane /making people mad cuz he’s changin’ up the game”

Anand wheels onstage for the TEDxBU event, an afternoon of motivational and inspirational talks sanctioned by the TED organization and featuring local and national notables, at around 3:00 in the afternoon on April 25. He’s all swagger, with just the right amount of slink, tucking his chin ever so slightly into the creases of his shirt collar. As he walks up to the podium and draws his PowerPoint presentation forth from the MacBook before him, a guy in front of me whispers to his compadre, “This guy is such a hipster.”

Meanwhile Anand, his pallor waxing amphibious from the greenish glow of the projection behind him, is already rolling on about “Hip Hop and the Human Element,” or so he’s called his presentation. Considering earlier presentations included a ten-minute exploration of how some parts of electronic “blood gadgets” come from areas of the Congo at the expense of the lives of local Congolese, and another 15-minute talk by a 24-year-old recent college graduate who decided to up and build an orphanage in sub-Saharan Kenya, Anand has big shoes to fill.

He begins with background. He describes his parents, two Indian immigrants who came to America in the 1970s, and, so he says, “Became doctors like their other Indian friends.” The audience flashes audible smiles.

Then the Anands had children, and the family settled in Redhook, NY.

“It was pretty boring for my younger brother and I,” he recalls onstage. “We were both really into music but didn’t know what to do with it.”

And he wouldn’t know what to do with it till that fateful day, the day when everything changed, the day when he and his brother, Chester –– known now as InfinitiRock, the kid who makes Aviator’s beats ­­–– were visiting cousins.

“I found hip hop in New Jersey,” Anand remembers, over the sound of the audience shifting in its seats. It was as simple as their cousins backing out of their driveway, rolling down the window and allowing the flow of Notorious B.I.G. –– then new to the young Anands –– to “come billowing out” and smack them both in the face leaving behind a bruise on each that might maybe last a lifetime.

“That night I went home and immediately started writing everything,” he says. “Every day of my life after that I devoted to music.”

In the crowd, I see Putz and somewhere else is Conor Loughman, Anand’s friend and owner of Base Trip Records, the “local as fuck” label to which Anand is signed that Loughman started a few years ago while still a student at BU. Earlier, Loughman spoke where Anand speaks now, saying, “Music is a universal language, it helps people communicate,” as Anand now replies that hip-hop is “really about communication and how we move information.”

At this point, the two friends and creatives seem to be having a conversation, a dialogue, each responding to the other’s presentation, the way they might do in the studio, in the living room of Loughman’s apartment at 1056 Commonwealth Avenue, on the stoop outside it or on the bus to the big city.

“Rap needs to change / or maybe just I do”

Even big things get started in smaller places, like how hip-hop, Anand tells me, started in south Bronx in the 70s with Grandmaster Flash, and like how Aviator started in the aforementioned Comm Ave apartment in Allston, surrounded by Loughman and the rest of the Base Trip Records label, including but not limited to Allison Francis, a blonde not much larger than her guitar who considers herself to be Bob Dylan’s second-coming, and Micah Domingo, another rapper –– with whome no one in Allston would Anand.

A video survives from Anand’s Allston days that some may say sums them up well. Greenberg narrates the grainy 50-second clip with laughing nostalgia.

“I remember one day last summer, Avi and I were just fucking around and decided to go out ‘in the streetz’ and record some footage of him rhyming,” she starts. “He was riding his bike around, and I was following him with my shitty ass digital camera on video mode, and he would just spit rhyme after rhyme.”

They chose to stop in front of a “random house on Gardner Street” because Greenberg thought it would be a cool background (“A brick wall… how awesome…” she says, poking fun at herself), and Anand started rapping, when a mailman came into the shot to deliver to the very stoop that became Anand’s makeshift venue.

“While he was spitting, I was mostly pissed that jerk-off mailman ruined the shot and thought that the video probably wasn’t that great.  But after we had gone home to our respective apartments, I uploaded the video and watched it again,” Greenberg continues.

The clip, she says, gave her chills the second time around, keen eye for hip-hop amazed at how Anand’s flow outshined bad sound quality, a shaky camera and an unexpected visitor.

“In retrospect, the jerk-off mailman’s cameo provides an interesting aspect to the video. Avi is just some ordinary college-lookin’ kid. Nobody, not even a jerk-off mailman, should feel obligated to respect him,” she whiles. “And yet, Avi’s flow demands your respect, because it’s that fucking good.  That’s when I realized that one day, it’s going to happen for him.  He deserves it.”

“Cuz my sound’s so sonorous / hip-hop’s still a little game that I bother with”

Anand never did have time to finish his presentation at the TEDxBU event. He stopped right short in the middle of a sentence, some invisible red light right damaging his flow for a few seconds before he picked it back up.

“The lesson is,” he tells the audience, recovering, “Do not generalize hip-hop in people.”

With that he waylays from Anand into Aviator –– and quite a different type of motivational speaking. He begins to rap.

“I met hip-hop when I was 10 years old / And what I loved about her, she had so much soul,” he licks into the mic, big smile, shoulders hunched knees pegged into a plie and free hand whipping inward to stroke the beat that results when words punctuate stale air.

A few lines later he zips the whole thing up with a spiking spit that’s perhaps the best stage exit of the day: “This is something big / And it’s bigger than me / Right on.”

And then he’s gone.

The next weekend I run into Anand and Loughman by chance, while biking by the stoop of 1056 Comm. Anand’s in front of the door on his phone like, “Yeah, come over, we’re making music,” and Loughman in a baseball cap calling over to some kid on a fixie like, “When are you gonna have time to hang out?”

After Anand hangs up his call and opens the door for a girl in a sundress holding a lot of groceries, I ask him what’s up. He says not much, “We’re just chillin’.”

“Havin’ a chill-back,” Loughman pipes in.

“A chill kick-back?” I ask, slumped over my handlebars.

“And Chester’s inside,” Anand adds, grinning and gesturing to a window, out of which pours, in true form, some unidentified hip-hop.

Hoping for another interview, I ask what he’s doing tomorrow, ‘round 6:00. He’s mentioned his next step, dropping the LP Bigger than my Matador, and I want to know more about it.

“Ah, I’ll be gone by then––” he says, tracing his trajectory back to New York. And with that, he leans in for a hug and some brief eye contact, and then it’s right back to the phone, the door, the laughing, the passersby –– all of which he knows –– and the beats and the night and the last little bit of weekend, the last little bit of Allston, the last little bit of Aviator he can siphon before it’s time come back down and start Monday as Neil again. Which isn’t to say he’ll be anywhere near grounded –– I hear him laughing from a block away.

Listen to Aviator and learn yourself something fresh at his MySpace.

Image Courtesy of the artist.

• The Sonorus