One day, Sahil brought in a piece of cardboard, rolled it up and asked Meera to sing through it – the result was a haunting echo. When the echo was too much, he would moisten the cardboard. Soon, he wanted the same atmospheric quality in every instrument. So, he stripped off parts of the soundproof sponge from the walls of the studio. When that was not enough, he went to the outskirts of Bombay to make 300 recordings of the wind blowing through the trees. Back at the studio, the 300 sounds were heard on six layered tracks to create a unique base for the songs of longing sung in the wilderness of the Himalayan orchards.

For more uplifting songs, he had Meera stay in a five-star hotel in Juhu to give her a marked change in mood. He did away with the orchestral setup and made the musicians play their instruments separately. One didn’t know what the other would play – Sahil did blind overdubs, and the music sounded strangely disjointed yet unimaginably fluid at the same time. Meera’s voice, however, remained the centrepiece of his compositions. Her beautiful vocals held everything together, never overpowering the arrangement or drowning out Sahil’s technical prowess. His mad methods led to even more delays. He had the whole crew booked in the same Juhu hotel as Meera, and so everyone had to follow the same schedule and were at his beck and call. Two adjacent rooms were joined to make a makeshift studio.

One night, he called Meera to the studio to brief her on the next session, and asked her to sing the mukhda of the track. It didn’t take much time for Meera to get it right as she was completely and utterly living in the dream world that Sahil had created. As she sang with her eyes closed, he walked over to her and held her face, just like the farmer had held the mysterious woman’s face, and dissimilar to how the protagonist held his lover when he realized the walnuts had been wiped clean off the ground.

Meera recoiled in shock when she found Sahil breathing down her neck. Before she knew it, his wiry hands proceeded to grab her waist. Malik pulled her close to his body with considerable force, and she could feel him harden against her. Meera couldn’t believe what was happening, but her shock was quickly replaced by anger. No man had ever dared to touch her that way; not even Abhimanyu, whom she had loved with all her heart. She tried to push Sahil away, but he tightened his grip around her.

‘Malik saab … Sahil!’