In her essay Ballad for Goa, about the jazz guitarist Amancio D’Silva, scholar Nicole-Ann Lobo writes: “To be Goan is to be at once tied to a particular place and to bear claim to a heritage that is universal, worldly, and fundamentally cosmopolitan”. As I write this essay, sitting in my bedroom in Bandra with the welcome sound of the first rains outside my window, I am struck by how my performance of music such as Sorabji’s and Esmail’s is my own way of integrating the parts of myself that are cleaved across geographies and artistic traditions.

Articulating a cultural space for myself, a Catholic Goan from Mumbai, within the world of Western Classical music, requires that I constantly reconstruct my art to be relevant across geographical and cultural boundaries. In their works I can find opposing but equally poignant expressions of the dual ties of my Indian roots and my Western musicality.

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