Kamal’s father, the late Pandit Jayshankar Apte, was once a moderately successful Hindustani classical vocalist. Meera, the youngest of three siblings, had taken after him and followed him into classical music. In fact, barring Kamal, the entire family was musically inclined.

It wasn’t long after Jayshankar’s premature death that the wolves were at the Aptes’ door – Jayshankar had incurred a small but not entirely insignificant debt, and his lenders had come to collect. The oldest of them, Veena, took a job as a bank teller and became the breadwinner of the family. Kamal stumbled his way through numerous unsatisfying odd jobs – from a dockyard worker to an operator at the textile mill to a short-lived entrepreneurial stint as a fruit seller. The only constant in his life that had his sincere attention was cricket.

Then, tragedy befell the family again – their mother, Kamladevi’s health deteriorated rapidly and put another strain on the family’s finances. The sound of music, once so prevalent throughout the day in the Apte homestead, began to fade, save for Meera’s undying love for it, which prompted her to religiously perform her riyaz in the mornings. Apart from that, her days were spent running errands after college and helping her sister with the housework.

Despite the obstacles in front of her, all Meera dreamt of was a chance to be heard by the people who could change her fortune. And where else could it happen if not in Bombay?

Among the millions who had migrated across the border between India and Pakistan were a handful of thespians, musicians and lyricists – people from the pre-Independence province of Punjab and elsewhere, who couldn’t resist the lure of Bombay. They chose art over religion, arriving in the city of dreams. Some stalwarts from Calcutta chose escapism over realism, Hindi over Bengali to set up base in the new cosmopolitan Bombay. In the evenings, Meera would knock on the doors of these creative migrants, riding on buses, trams and trains for an opportunity to show them that she too was an artiste, and that her voice was worthy of being heard.

That was the voice that Abhimanyu first heard in its full glory at the Apte’s humble adobe in Bandra, and he instantly knew that one day it would travel a thousand miles beyond the Indian subcontinent and rule the hearts of millions. It wasn’t lost on him that had the golden voice belonged to a person from a more privileged background, she would have already been the toast of the nation. Music knows no boundaries, but it does travel through privileged channels, he thought, as he witnessed Meera being turned down without getting an honest shot at proving her mettle.

For an apprehensive man fighting an uncertain future, Meera showed Abhimanyu that there was beauty in the struggle. Over the course of the following months, he would witness her battle rejections with all the grace in the world.

Chapter 4

‘I am sorry, non-members are not allowed to play.’ Mr Bakshi, the portly manager of the Orient Club, was arguing with Abhimanyu.