New Delhi, June 30 -- How do you mourn a person you've never met? How do you process the bone-deep longing for an ancestral homeland you've never visited? New Delhi jazz drummer and composer Tarun Balani confronts these questions head-on in his new album Kadahin Milandaasin, an evocative and elegiac exploration of identity, displacement and the collective grief of a community in permanent exile.

The album is inspired by the musician's inherited memories of his grandfather Khialdas Suratram Balani, a writer, painter and photographer who migrated from his home in Naushahro Feroze in Sindh to the refugee colony in Lajpat Nagar in 1952, in the wake of India's Partition. Balani never met his grandfather, who passed away aged just 40 in 1970. ...