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Indian Express

Musician Tarun Balani's latest album is a meditation on memory and loss

Thirty-eight-year-old Tarun Balani has never been to Sindh, his ancestral homeland that was lost to Partition. Named after river Sindhu, meaning Indus, he has never felt the soil of the land between his fingers or visited the revered Jhulelal shrine in Pakistan's Odero Lal, where Sindhi Hindus and Muslims worship together. But through the stories that the Delhi-based musician heard about his grandfather, who came from Sindh and lived in Delhi's Lajpat Nagar — the refugee colony created post-Partition and where many displaced Sindhis and Multanis were accommodated — Balani would often conjure a place, which was never going to be straightforward to go back to, even sonically. Home was a loss he had inherited. 'I feel with Sindhis, the diaspora stories are still missing. It is understandable, probably because Sindh completely went to Pakistan. But there was, and is, so much palpable grief that no one really speaks about. And that's also what I wanted to explore,' says Balani, who wanted to portray this feeling through sonic narratives. Another major reason was that he sorely missed his grandfather, whom he had never met. He only had a bunch of photos and his Yashica 635 since he was very young. 'Since my grandfather passed away in a car accident when he was 40, my family didn't speak much about him,' says Balani, who began poring over whatever was left behind. He found that KS Balani was a postmodern Sindhi writer, photographer and painter in the Delhi of the 1960s. 'It is only now that I have discovered his manuscripts, his writing. I started to explore his journey of migration and that is when I wanted to find my Sindhi identity as well,' says Balani. The longing for his grandfather also turned into a longing for the homeland that his community lost. The result of the emotional turmoil is a seven-track, deeply personal album that is a meditation on memory and loss. 'The album is a metaphor for my grandfather as much as it is for the lost homeland,' says Balani, who was inspired by famed Sindhi poet Sheikh Ayaz's poem Tiri Pawanda about the pain of separation and reuniting someday. Balani flipped one of the lines — Tadahen milandaaseen (We will meet then) to Kadahin Milandaasin (When will we meet again?), which is the title of the album. He adds that as people, we don't talk about grief enough and he wanted to honour the feeling he felt for his grandfather. His father's death last year in November amplified the pain. He wondered about two photographs his father gave him last February. One is a black-and-white shot of his grandparents and other a self-portrait of his grandfather — both are now part of the album cover. With Adam O'Farrill on trumpet, Sharik Hasan on piano, Olli Hirvonen on guitar and electronics and Balani on drums and vocals, the album was recorded by Grammy-winning sound engineer and producer John Davis. There are no Sindhi stringed instruments or field recordings from Pakistan that have been layered with jazz sounds. Instead, Balani has stayed true to his sound and that of his band and delineated loss as a feeling. He has represented his heritage through what he identifies with most and not reproduced what he's heard and even loved from his culture. While the elegant Lajpat Nagar Sometimes comes from Balani's fascination with the idea that his studio space is also the one where his grandfather wrote and painted, the title track is where he's sung for the first time, an ode to his father, who sang Hindustani classical, and always wanted his son to sing. The haunting Sailaab plays out the 2020 floods in Sindh while Every Man Saved A Victim Will Be Found is an interpretation of Balani's most-streamed track from his EP In Song (2021), inspired by a line in Viktor Frankl's 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning based on his time living in concentration camps. In the music video of the title track, Balani has attempted to recreate the parties from his childhood; with typical Sindhi motifs — the Ajrakh shawl, Sindhi topi and Sindhi roti make an appearance. But such an album was likely to come at an emotional cost, and if he was lucky, with an emotional reward as well. Does Balani understand his place better? 'Absolutely. I went in with a simple quest to understand my roots and legacy, but it was still a borrowed experience; the grief was through the lens of other people, but after losing my dad, I understood it more deeply. In the end, I was tracing my granddad and his lineage but I found a version of myself that I didn't know existed,' says Balani. Recently, some Sindhi literature teachers have written to Balani telling him that they teach his grandfather's stories to their students. 'Life has come full circle,' he says.