‘When Will We Meet?’: Tarun Balani on his desire to tell the stories of the Sindhi diaspora in sound

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...

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