KADAHIN MILANDAASIN: Tarun Balani’s Sonic Memoir of Displacement, Grief & Belonging
Photo: Mohit Kapil
Delhi-based musician Tarun Balani’s new album weaves jazz improvisation with Sindhi folk echoes, creating a cohesive journey through memory, identity, and longing.
In his 2025 album Kadahin Milandaasin, Sindhi for “When Will We Meet?” Tarun Balani emerges not just as a jazz musician, but as a sonic memoirist. Over the span of seven compositions, he fashions a richly textured narrative that weaves jazz improvisation with Sindhi folk echoes, creating a cohesive journey through memory, identity, and longing.
Far from being a collection of tracks, it is an elegiac suite, a reflective odyssey rooted in familial history, cultural afterlife, and personal grief.
From the outset, the album’s name poses an existential question, rather than offering resolution. Balani adapts a verse by Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz, originally “Tade Milanda Si” (“We shall meet then”), into “Kadahin Milandaasin?” (“When will we meet?”), transforming a statement of reunion into an uncertain plea. This inversion sets the tone: the album is not about meeting but about yearning to meet, a landscape of absence. The question echoes throughout, reverberating against the void of homeland, the death of loved ones, and the ongoing search for self. Balani’s personal chronicles anchor each track. Inspired by his grandfather, KS Balani—a postmodern Sindhi photographer, painter, and writer, who died soon after Tarun was born—these tracks become a bridge across time.
In February, Balani shared the story behind his inspirations at a listening session at Delhi’s Oddbird Theatre. “There were 16 mm photographs taken by my grandfather, all messily kept in a Danish cookie box in a cupboard,” Balani said. “Whenever my family was out, I’d sneakily look at the picture for hours on end.”
Raised amidst his grandfather’s art and an ancestral Yashica camera, Balani was unconsciously acting out his grandfather’s artistic legacy. Kadahin Milandaasin is thus less a tribute and more a reclamation: giving voice to a man he never knew, and the heritage he carried within him. The album translates private curiosity and inherited sorrow into collective catharsis.
Musically, Kadahin Milandaasin is a spacious, emotionally charged blend of modern jazz, ambient minimalism, and Indian folk inspirations. Balani’s drumming is fluid and expressive, shaping mood more than keeping time, while piano, trumpet, and voice drift in and out like passing weather. The compositions favour atmosphere over climax, with melodies that unravel slowly and rhythms that feel conversational. Influences like Tigran Hamasyan, Ambrose Akinmusire, and the ECM soundscape are quite possibly present, but filtered through a distinctly South Asian lens: intimate, searching, and quietly radical.
Each track situates listeners geographically. The first track, “Lajpat Nagar Sometimes”, pays homage to Delhi’s storied refugee colony, where Sindhi migrants–including Balani’s family, resettled after 1947. The music conjures quotidian textures–crowded bazaars, shared meals, Sindhi temple ceremonies, while channeling the wistful ache of displacement.
Kadahin Milandaasin is thus less a tribute and more a reclamation: giving voice to a man Balani never knew, and the heritage he carried within him. The album translates private curiosity and inherited sorrow into collective catharsis.
In the title track, the second movement, “Kadahin Milandaasin”, Balani introduces voice for the first and only time, a direct, fragile whisper of the album’s central question, accompanied by Adam O’Farrill’s trumpet that echoes his vocal lament.
An ex-classmate of mine recently posted an Instagram story that said, “Sometimes if you’re lucky, there will be a tree outside your bedroom window. It is very important to romanticise this tree as much as possible.” The track “The Laburnum Blooms” is about just that, and specifically, the trees of Delhi. Outside Balani’s grandfather’s house stood a sturdy Gulmohar tree, keeping him company whilst he painted. Outside his own apartment is a beautiful almatas tree watching over him, and offering solace as he makes music too offering him a place of solace to make his music.
Then the album folds into broader diasporic recollections: “Sailaab” paints a somber picture of the 2020 floods in Sindh, blending structured passages with free‑form piano overflow to embody the unpredictability of water. “Locusts Are Descending” conjures eight heavy minutes of atmospheric unease, anchored in ambient tension and the collective trauma of the environmental crisis.
Despite its emotional breadth, the album maintains cohesive internal architecture. Balani composes the material but deliberately leaves space for his international band, Dharm, to jam along: guitarist Olli Hirvonen (Finland), pianist Sharik Hasan (India), trumpeter Adam O’Farrill (USA), and Balani himself on drums and synth. Across compositions, this quintet draws on contemporary jazz freedom, but the music never fractures; each solo feels narrative, not decorative. The result is organic—music conceived and realized as one breathing organism.
One masterstroke lies in the album’s balance of fresh songs and reinterpretations. After exploring new ground through the first half, Balani re‑approaches older compositions, like “Samadhi” and the Frankl-inspired “For Every Man Saved A Victim Will Be Found”, re‑contextualizing them in the album’s larger story.
The older songs, including the 2024‑reworked single “Samadhi 02.11.2024”, gain a new emotional mask after the death of Balani’s father. This dialogue between old and new art provides structural resonance, suggesting that grief and memory are not linear, they spiral.
Although predominantly instrumental, the album’s emotional core crystallizes when Balani sings “Kadahin Milandaasin”—his first recorded vocal attempt. Uttering those words in Sindhi, he transforms the question into a ritual, a chant. This vocal moment is neither ornamental nor tokenistic. It is the emotional nucleus around which the rest of the musical architecture coalesces. When the trumpet returns, refracting that voice contrapuntally, the album says: the question echoes far beyond a single phrase.
On The Indian Music Diaries, Sarthak Sharma describes Kadahin Milandaasin as a “museum of his grief”, an archive of a diaspora’s traumas. Sharma writes, “There’s a certain depth on this record that makes me cry. It speaks to a hole in my heart.”
In his many mournings—his grandfather, his father, and his homeland Sindh—Balani balances the album between the personal and the archetypal. However, Kadahin Milandaasin never collapses into nostalgia; rather, it finds dignity and linguistic richness in translation, Sindhi to jazz, absence to improvisation. In its final tracks, persistence echoes: the question remains, but so does the music that refuses silence.
Kadahin Milandaasin also resists being reduced to mere homage, cultural fusion, or sentimental journey. Instead, it functions as a formal whole: question, answer, tension, release. It spans continents—Sindh, Lajpat Nagar, Brooklyn—and generations—grandfather, father, son. It privileges improvisation while abiding by narrative momentum. Its music is at once rooted (Sindhi folk echoes, laburnum blossoms, disrupted waters) and cosmopolitan (jazz phrasing, ambient atmospheres). Above all, it pulses with the drive to speak history back into being.
The title track’s plaintive vocal encapsulates the album’s ambition: to articulate longing without resolution. The refrain “When will we meet?” isn’t answered. Instead, it lingers, haunting the listener. Through rhythmic cycles and melodic refrain, Balani communicates that some meetings remain latent: potential, postponed, remembered. The album becomes an elegy for absence, but an argument for continued reckoning.
In the end, Kadahin Milandaasin is best understood as a sonic palimpsest, layers of memory inscribed over one another, never fully erased, but made musical. It is an album that trusts the listener to sit within its question. To wait. To remember. And to ponder, always: When will we meet?
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Treya Sinha hopes to be a journalist someday. At the moment, she reads, writes and she loves taking long walks. You can find her on Instagram: @treyasinha.
