Around this time last year, when I started writing the music for my album Kadahin Milandaasin, the gulmohar tree outside my studio window was in full bloom. Its red flowers, set against the dull, grey New Delhi sky, had created quite a striking contrast.
I was sitting at my piano and reached for my phone to click a picture and began writing a tune inspired by the trees of Delhi, which ended with the title The Laburnum Blooms that is featured on the album.
I have admired this gulmohar tree over the years through many seasons: first from my bedroom window, and for the past eight or nine years from my music studio, housed in our ancestral home in Lajpat Nagar.
I had also just recently learned that my grandfather, the late KS Balani – a prominent postmodern Sindhi writer, painter, and photographer – had once used this same space to write and paint. I wondered if he, too, had looked out at the same tree.
I never met my grandfather. While growing up, we rarely spoke about him – there was a palpable grief my family carried from his passing at the age of 40, in 1970. I came to know him only through his paintings, his 6x6 square photographs and his Yashica 635 box camera.
As a child, whenever my parents went out, I’d sneak into my father’s cupboard, take out the camera, and spend the whole day pretending to be a filmmaker – creating stories in my head.
In a way, I was already seeing the world through my grandfather’s lens. I would spend hours gazing at his paintings, imagining entire worlds within the abstractions of colour and form. Maybe that is what shaped my artistic choices to this day.
I often wonder what it would be like if I could meet him and ask him about his life in post-Partition India as a Sindhi artist – his writing inspiration and process, his painting styles and his street photography techniques. But also about his life back in Naushahro Feroze in Sindh and how he migrated to Lajpat Nagar in 1952.
It has taken me many years to understand that I have been grieving his loss – slowly, silently. And that there is another, deeper grief that my family, like so many other Sindhi families, have carried across generations: the grief for a lost homeland, for Sindh.
It was this question, stemming from longing and the desire to tell the stories of the Sindhi diaspora – often missing from the larger Partition narrative – that Kadahin Milandaasin or When Will We Meet? first began. However, little did I know that the title would take on a completely different meaning and how deeply personal this body of work would become for me.
When I shared the concept of the album with my father, he gave me two photographs – one of my grandfather and another of my grandparents – which now appear on the cover and back cover of the album. It felt like a full-circle moment for me, as my debut album Sacred World had also featured my grandfather’s photographs. In many ways, it felt like Kadahin Milandaasin had been quietly brewing for years.
I see myself as a sonic storyteller – I don’t like being boxed in as a musician, drummer, or composer. I am all those things, but at my core, I tell stories through sound. Whether it’s my solo electronic music, immersive sound installations around climate change, or this latest work with my quartet – it’s always about the story.
This time, the story is deeply personal. It’s the story of my family and our Sindhi heritage – complex, hybrid, layered with multiple histories and emotional dimensions. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to arrive at this moment of personal connection to our culture, art, music, and literature.
I believe there’s a narrow and often superficial portrayal of Sindhi culture in popular culture, reduced to just a handful of stereotypes. What’s often missed is the profound contribution Sindhis have made to arts, literature, music, and thought, especially in the aftermath of Partition.
In exploring my own roots, I’ve discovered powerful voices from Sindhi modernist movements – writers and artists like Gobind Malhi, Popati Hiranandani (a contemporary of my grandfather) and Sheikh Ayaz, whose revolutionary and deeply humanist poetry still resonates. Then there’s the spiritual depth of Sindhi Sufi music, rooted in the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.
My grandfather belonged to a generation of Sindhi artists in the 1960s who engaged with modernist ideas. They produced work that was layered, political and emotionally rich. It’s a world far removed from the clichéd image of Sindhi culture we often see today.
There’s also a quiet resilience in the way the Sindhi community has preserved its language, traditions, and values despite displacement. Much of our heritage lives in oral history, family archives, folk forms and daily rituals. Kadahin Milandaasin is my way of engaging with that richness – digging beneath the surface to find and share stories that rarely get told.
The album’s title is inspired from Sheikh Ayaz’s poem Tiri Pawanda, which contains the poignant line: Tade Milanda Si – “We will meet then”. As I reflected on the poem and the legacy of Partition, that line stayed with me. However, I chose to turn it around into a question: When Will We Meet? – Kadahin Milandaasin in Sindhi. This question became the heart of the album.
I finished composing the music and traveled to New York in June 2024 to record the album with my band, Dharma, featuring Adam O’Farrill on trumpet and electronics, Olli Hirvonen on guitar and electronics, and Sharik Hasan on piano and synthesizer. Throughout my time in New York, I carried the two pictures my father had given me, tucked safely in my wallet. In a way, I wanted my grandfather – who never had the opportunity to travel so far – to experience the world alongside me.
My father was instrumental in the making of this album. As a surprise for him, I sang the lyrics Kadahin Milandaasin in Sindhi on the album’s title track. I was so excited to share it with him. But sadly, he passed away in November and I never got the chance to play it for him.
In his final days, as he lay in a coma in the ICU, I sat beside him and sang: Kadahin Milandaasin. When will we meet?
After he passed, while going through his belongings, I found my grandfather’s Yashica 635 camera in his cupboard, along with all the black-and-white 6×6 photographs I had grown up with. When I held the camera, I felt like a child again – as if I were being embraced by both my father and my grandfather.
A few months have passed since then and it’s April 2025. As I catch a quick coffee break between an afternoon packed with drum lessons, I find myself admiring the gulmohar tree through my studio window. I pick up the Yashica and look through the viewfinder – the gulmohar is in full bloom.
Kadahin Milandaasin can be accessed here.
