THE BOOK OF SETHI

PROLOGUE: THE FIRST TIME GRIEF SANG

I don’t remember the first time I heard Ali Sethi.

I remember what I lost when I did.

Something inside me— the part that kept sorrow folded beneath my tongue— opened its eyes.

It wasn’t music. It was recognition.

A voice that didn’t arrive like thunder, but like memory—slow, precise, mercifully cruel.

It sang in the key of ache I inherited but never named.

This is not about songs.

It’s about the ruins they left glowing.

It begins, always, with silence.

And then: Ali.

1

TO THE VOICE THAT ARRIVED BEFORE STORM

Some nights,

I don’t know if it’s rain,

or your voice

pressing its forehead

against my window.

Ali,

you don’t sing—

you stitch.

Each word, a needle pulling

centuries through my skin.

I keep your ragas

in my wrists—

they flutter when grief walks in,

asking for tea

and permission to stay.

Who gave you the right

to know what longing sounds like

before I could name it?

Who taught your throat

to echo

the ache I buried

beneath my mother tongue?

Sometimes,

I think I was born

just to weep

in the key of your falsetto.

Not because I’m broken,

but because

you remind me

that even ruin

can be beautiful

when it remembers how to tremble.

You once sang:

"Chandni raat mein ek baar tujhe dekha hai"

And I haven’t slept since.

I keep staring at the moon

asking if it’s jealous.

You are not a man.

You are a return.

You are a room in Lahore

where silence

and song

share a cigarette

and call it prayer.

And I—

I am just a listener

folding my hurt

into your voice,

hoping it sounds

like healing

when played backwards.

2.

ALI SETHI SINGS, AND SOMETHING INSIDE ME BREAKS BEAUTIFULLY

Ali Sethi doesn’t sing — he remembers.

And when he remembers, he takes you with him.

Not as an audience.

As an ache.

Some voices climb octaves.

His?

It kneels in the garden of grief,

cupping petals made of old cities,

forgotten names,

and the kind of love that doesn’t leave

— it just gets quieter.

There’s something ancestral about his vowels.

As if each note is a prayer passed down in secret,

whispered into clay lamps and rosewater.

When he sings “Chandni Raat,”

it isn’t moonlight that spills.

It’s longing — old, dignified, scented with loss —

like the dupatta your grandmother folded when her lover left for a war that never made the history books.

His voice doesn’t pierce.

It wraps.

Like a letter in Urdu you can’t read

but still press to your chest

because you know it says

something holy.

Something like “stay.”

And what does it mean

to be loved like that?

To be sung to

in a language older than your wounds?

To be held not by hands,

but by raag?

He doesn’t perform.

He invites.

Not into spectacle,

but into silence.

The kind that sits beside you

on a night train through Lahore,

or in the alleyways of Delhi

where the air still smells like ghazal.

And when he sings “Pasoori,”

you almost believe

that love and rebellion

can waltz without apology.

That borders are just stubborn ghosts

that grief refuses to obey.

Ali Sethi doesn’t save you.

He names you.

Softly.

Without claiming.

And that, perhaps,

is the truest kind of mercy.

3.

ALI SETHI SINGS AND I REMEMBER WHO I TRIED TO FORGET  

Ishq is not a song.

It’s a wound with lipstick on.

A slow dance between ruin and rebirth.

When Ali sings “Ishq,”

he doesn’t tell you to fall in love.

He tells you what it will cost.

Not in flowers.

But in silences too loud to carry.

He drags “ishq” like a bruised veil across each syllable — tender, trembling, like someone reciting a lover’s name after they've forgotten it.

You don’t listen to Ishq.You confess to it.

“Chaan Kithan” is lonelier.

It is a boy

sitting by the window of his boyhood

asking the sky questions the sky cannot answer.

"Chaan kithan gujari aayi raat way..."

he asks the moon,

but it’s not the moon he misses.

It’s someone who once called him home.

Ali’s voice here is all ache and dusk.

You can smell the sari left drying on the roof.You can hear the echo of bangles taken off too slowly.This is the kind of yearning that folds laundry at midnight, because it can’t sleep without the scent of someone gone. It’s not a question.It’s a grief ritual.

And then there’s “Ranjish Hi Sahi.”

My god.

This isn’t just a song.

It’s a final prayer in a dying tongue.

It’s someone begging to be broken

as long as they’re broken by you.

“Ranjish hi sahi, dil hi dukhane ke liye aa...”

— come.

Even if to hurt.

Just come.

Ali doesn’t sing this like a human.

He sings it like a ruin wearing roses.

Every note is velvet wrapped around a knife.

He offers no healing.

Only devotion.

And somehow, that’s enough......

When Ali Sethi sings,

he doesn’t rescue you from your sorrow.

He gives it a seat at the table.

He pours it tea, honeyed with memory .

He makes your blue heart feel seen,

not as a failure—

but as a form of devotion.

Because only someone who has loved through cracked mirrors and closed doors can sing like that.

Because only someone who has stayed up at 4:17 a.m.,writing names in notebooks they’ll never send can soften a word like ranjish into something worth worshipping.

4.

ALI SETHI SINGS LIKE HE HAS INHERITED WOMEN'S SORROWS (with Begum Akhtar & Amrita Pritam)

There’s a way Ali Sethi pronounces silence—

as if it once had a body

and he held it too long.

Some nights, when the tabla weeps gently beside him and the harmonium folds like a sigh, I can almost hear Begum Akhtar in the shadow of his voice. 

Not in imitation.But in mourning. 

She is there,

not as a ghost, but as the memory of a woman who knew the difference between being adored and being devoured. Ali sings like he has kissed the wrist , where Begum once hid her loneliness.

Like he has walked barefoot, across the ghazals she never got to finish.

Like every note is her untold story, retold with the reverence of a lover and the discipline of a disciple.

He does not decorate her grief. He translates it.

And then there is Amrita.You don’t hear her.

You feel her— somewhere between the second verse and the faltered breath.

Her scent is there.

That wild jasmine of defiance.

Because when Ali Sethi sings aavaaragi or intezaar, he is not singing for a woman. He is singing like one.

He knows what it is to wait at the border of longing.

He knows what it is to light a cigarette with a poem and burn slow.

He carries Amrita’s rebellion, not in slogans, but in the way his voice never begs—it just invites. To suffer.To stay. To listen without rescue. Like her,he does not apologize for bleeding beautifully.

When Ali Sethi performs,

he wears other people's sorrows

like borrowed shawls.

He folds them into his throat,

not to save them—

but so they never vanish.

In him,

Begum Akhtar hums again,

not as a singer—

but as a wound still humming.

In him,

Amrita writes again,

not on paper—

but on the inside of our ribs.

And somewhere between his ghazal

and our shivering,

we understand—

To sing like this

is not to perform.

It is to have a heirloom no market can offer.

5.

ALI SETHI AND FAIZ: WHERE PROTEST BECOMES PRAYER  (Where Memory as a Soft Revolution)

Faiz wrote as if blood could rhyme.

And Ali sings like he remembers that.

But this is not performance.

This is inheritance.

Faiz gave us poems that we folded into our pockets when we didn’t know if morning would come.

And now,

Ali takes those poems and tucks them into his throat, as if the most dangerous thing you can do with a revolution is to make it sound beautiful.

He does not belt.

He aches.

He does not declare.

He invites.

In "Hum Dekhenge,"

you hear more than resistance—

you hear faith learning how to walk again,

with bruised feet

and borrowed hope.

Ali doesn’t just sing Faiz. He hosts him—

gives his verses warm tea and a silence that listens back.

Listen to when he sings “Ranjish hi sahi,” it isn’t heartbreak. It’s exile. The kind of exile where

you still send letters to the country you once called home, even if it never writes back.

Ali sings like someone

who understands that longing

is a kind of geography.

And Faiz?

Faiz lives in that geography.

He is the soft thunder behind the raag. The quiet clenched fist in the alaap.

The two of them— one dead, one singing— form a bridge between what was written and what must be remembered.

When the lights dim,and the tanpura hums like history, Ali Sethi sings. And in that moment, Faiz returns.

Not as a martyr. Not as a monument.

But as a man who once whispered poetry to keep his hands from trembling in a jail cell.

Ali does the same—

Only,

his jail is soft silk.

His resistance is tuned.

And his rebellion—

his most dangerous act—

is that he makes us feel tender about a world that tried to crush us. Because sometimes, the most radical thing is not to shout.

It’s to sing like Faiz once wrote:

 “Bol ke lab azaad hain tere”

Speak— because the song is your weapon now.

And the silence,

is tired of being polite.

6.

ALI &COHEN: TWO PRIESTS OF THE BROKEN HYMN (From the threshold of prayer and ache)

If Cohen’s voice was a gravel prayer,

Ali’s is the water that seeps through it.

They meet somewhere between dusk and dying—where the lover becomes a theologian, and every note is a quiet negotiation with God.

Cohen asked for hallelujahs in the arms of women and at the edge of despair.

Ali sings as if hallelujah is still possible— even if it arrives drenched in betrayal, perfumed with memory, and stitched with exile.

Cohen never begged for clarity.

Ali never promises resolution.

They both know: some songs don’t heal.

They hold.

When Ali sings “Chaan Kithan,”

he doesn’t search for the moon.

He becomes the waiting.

When Cohen said,

"There is a crack in everything,"

Ali replied,

"Even ghazals bleed from there."

Both are men who walk into rooms of silence and ask it to sing back.

Not loudly. Not in victory.

But in that low, trembling tone we only use, when we’re trying not to fall apart, infront of God.

7.

BETWEEN BORDERS, A VOICE

I was born in India. He sings from Pakistan.

But somewhere in the middle— between mistrust and memory, between partition and poetry—a voice crossed over.

Ali Sethi did not ask for a visa. His notes didn’t knock.

It entered like longing does: uninvited, undeniable.

Here, we are taught to name borders first, then people.

But Ali’s voice never learned that order.It named the ache instead.

He sang in a language both of us forgot to claim, and suddenly, Lahore didn’t feel so far.

We were just two sides of the same ache— tuned to the same grief.

And we listened.Because sometimes, a song does what decades of dialogue could not:It remembers us to each other.... 

A voice crossed borders, climbed the wall of my restraint,and whispered my ache back to me in raag. Because some voices don’t ask for freedom. They sound like it.

8. 

THE BOY WHO DRESSED LONGING IN PERFUME

Ali Sethi didn’t write "The Wish Maker".

He remembered it—like a boy would remember the scent of his mother’s rosewater bottle: not for the rose, but for the way it lingered long after she left the room.

This isn’t just a novel.

It’s a dusty courtyard in Rehman Gardens, where democracy limps, aunties gossip in coded sighs, and dreams wear lipstick they’re not allowed to buy.

The boy—Zaki—isn’t Ali.

But you can hear his pulse in the margin notes.

That gentle, defiant tempo of someone too tender for his history and too wise for his age.He grows up with dreams shaped by satellite dishes, secret cassettes, and a cousin named Samar Api who burns too brightly for the world she’s in.

She believes in love like it’s a revolution. 

He believes in her like it’s the only country that won’t exile him.

And all the while, Lahore listens. Watches. Waits.

It is not backdrop. It is bloodstream.

In Ali’s Lahore, the past is never past. It presses its perfume into every curtain, every heartbreak, every television broadcast muffled by a power cut.

Sometimes, I wonder if Ali wrote this book so he wouldn’t forget how grief looked when it was young— before it learned to speak in elegies, when it still laughed at Bollywood endings and kissed its first heartbreak behind a curtain of jasmine.

Zaki is a boy made of questions.

He learns early that silence isn’t absence.

It is choreography—how women pour tea with secrets folded in each clink, how men argue politics not to fix the country, but to feel less helpless in their own homes.

And then Samar Api— equal parts firecracker and soft ache. She teaches Zaki (and us) that freedom isn’t always won on stages. Sometimes, it’s stolen—in glances, in quiet disobediences, in the radio playing Indian songs just a little too loud.

She is what happens when a woman loves too much for the world to handle.

And too rightly for it to forgive.

Ali doesn’t dramatize rebellion. He sets it at the dinner table.

The novel is not a protester, but an observant. Like the harmonium in Ali’s songs—it waits for the silence to break first.

There are no heroes here. Only wishes:

Unsent. Unfolded. Unspoken.

And yet—there is tenderness.

God, there is tenderness.

Zaki’s coming of age isn’t loud. It arrives the way longing does: in a half-finished song, in a room full of arguments and mangoes, in the way Samar Api’s laughter sounds like it’s already a memory.

Ali Sethi doesn’t write for spectacle. He writes like someone wrapping sweetness around broken glass. So when it cuts, it doesn’t bleed cruelty.

It bleeds nostalgia. Isn't that cruelty too, a little softer ?

There is a line in the book where a character says,

 “History is always happening to someone else.”

But Ali refuses that escape.

He makes you feel the weight of it in wristwatches and wedding songs, in missed calls and in the way someone says “beta” with both love and defeat.

And beneath it all, there is music. Even in the prose, you hear raag. Even in the punctuation, you hear pause.

Ali writes as if Ghazal were a language spoken between generations—where what is left unsaid is the inheritance.

This is why I call him “the boy who dressed longing in perfume.”

Because he doesn’t just write nostalgia.

He wears it.

Because he doesn’t romanticize home.

He admits:

Sometimes, home bruises you with the same hand that feeds you mangoes.

And when the novel ends, it doesn’t really end.

It becomes a street you walk again months later—just to see if the light still falls the same on that one wall where Samar once leaned.

9.

LAHORE WRITTEN IN SIDE MY RIBCAGE 

Ali,

I have never been to Lahore.

But sometimes, when you sing,

i feel like the city is hiding

behind my lungs.

not the map—

but the memory.

your voice is not sound.

it is a scent:

of rain on courtyards,

ink on unfinished letters,

the rustle of a dupatta

folded beside goodbye.

you call it ghazal.

i call it muscle memory.

because when your ragas wavers,

something inside me answers—

not in words,

but in the tremble only cities know

when they miss someone too much to name.

Lahore,

i have never touched you.

but i carry your shape

in the architecture

of my hurt

and Ali,

your voice is the only map

that has ever made

my ribcage feel like

home.

I don’t understand every word you sing,

but my bones do:

they lean toward the sound

the way sunflowers lean

toward warmth they can’t explain....

10.

THE GHAZAL AS A FORM OF COMING OUT

(Or, How Ali Sethi Braids Queerness Into Classical Raga)

The ghazal was always queer. It just never had the language. Centuries of poets hiding behind metaphors, calling their beloved tu—

not he, not she,

just… ache.

The ghazal doesn’t ask, “Who do you love?”

It asks, “Do you dare admit it?”

And Ali?

Ali doesn’t just sing ghazals. He unbuttons them. He lets them breathe.

He queers them not by inserting identity but by refusing to erase it.

Every tu in his song is slippery—

sometimes god,

sometimes lover,

sometimes ghost,

sometimes me.

Sometimes all of the above.

Listen closely.

There is no gender in his voice.

Only hunger.

Only the prayer you whisper when the world has never made room for the shape of your wanting.

Ali does not shout his queerness. He lets it sit beside you, the way longing always has— uninvited, aching, proud.

There’s something radical about singing centuries-old love poems in a voice that holds not just ragas, but refusals.

The refusal to name. The refusal to apologize. The refusal to fit.

This is not performance.

This is survival, in 7 notes.

Ali’s ghazals are not straight. They spiral.

They flirt with the divine then land on the skin of a boy who once lit candles for a friend he couldn’t touch.

This isn’t “representation.” This is revolution dressed in velvet, raga, and restraint.

When he sings “Ranjish hi sahi”— I hear every queer heart that once begged for crumbs and called it worship.

When he sings “Chaan kithan gujari aayi raat way”— I see boys who waited at balconies for answers that never came.

Ali doesn’t come out in ghazals.

He lets the ghazal come out of its own silence.

He queers history by inhabiting it with his own longing.

He doesn’t say, “I am queer.” He sings,

“And if I am? Then what?”

And in a world that loves labels,

there is nothing braver

than choosing a raag

as your declaration.

11.

BETWEEN ALAAP AND APOLOGY

Ali Sethi sings as if he owes someone else's ghost an answer.

There’s a kind of joy in his voice—but it limps. 

It arrives like a guest who knows the house once belonged to someone burnt out of history.

Ali doesn’t just sing.

He "atonessings".

He "remembersings". 

He sings like a boy who found his grandfather’s harmonium in a room full of ash and pressed one key, just to hear if the past still works.

The raag blooms, but there’s guilt between each note. Like he knows melody can be theft if you don’t kneel first.

There is always kneeling in his alaap.

Not dramatic. Not performance.

But a bend— as if his voice leans forward to apologize to every woman, every city, every lover that the empire forgot to bury with dignity.

Ali Sethi sings like he inherited a palace built over someone else’s prayer rug. And so, every note is a soft sweeping— a gesture that says,I know this joy isn’t mine alone.

When he sings “Pasoori,”you hear delight, yes.

But if you listen again— there’s an ache beneath the defiance. Like joy isn’t celebration here.

It’s rebellion dressed in anklets.

Even when he smiles mid-verse, you get the sense he’s lighting incense in the ruins of a museum that was never built.

His songs aren’t asking to be loved. They’re asking to be forgiven.

And the alaap?

It never announces itself. It enters like an apology that forgot how to say sorry— so it just hums.

Sometimes, I wonder if Ali sings for us. Or for those whose names were taken off the credits centuries ago.

The mehfil is full,

but he looks like he’s singing to a window.

Maybe Lahore.

Maybe someone who never came back.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is restitution in 7 notes and a borrowed tanpura.

And if his voice sometimes trembles at the edges— it isn’t because he’s unsure.

It’s because even beauty feels like a burden when history still bleeds through the wallpaper.

Ali Sethi sings like someone who knows that to hold joy, you must first hold grief without flinching.

And then turn it into music without ever calling it yours.

12.

ALI , YOU RUINED SILENCE 

They warned me about falling in love with poets.

No one warned me about falling in love

with a voice.

Ali—

you do not sing.

You undress time.

You take centuries of ache,

fold them into five minutes of ragas and sighs,

and hand them back to us

still warm,

still trembling.

Ali—

your voice is a betrayal.

Of grief.

Of restraint.

Of everything I buried beneath my skin

to survive.

I have played your songs

like rosary beads—

each note a prayer I no longer believe in,

but still can’t stop whispering.

You taught me that longing can be ritual,

and absence, a language.

Now even my silence

hums your ghosted pitch.

Ali,

you taught me that desire is not romance.

It is ruin— with rhythm.

I say your name the way grief says mine: softly, without needing an answer.

Ali,

your song didn’t break me:  It baptized me in a language only wounds remember.

Ali,

I do not want to meet you.

I want you to remain a myth,

a night I keep returning to—

not to sleep,

but to bleed a little more beautifully.

Because when you sing,

I remember:

Love is not always safe.

But sometimes,

it is worth the ruin.

Ali, 

I do not want you near.

I want you eternal.

A wound that sings.

A voice I wear

like a bruise in the shape of a God.

And I keep pressing it,

just to see if I’m still alive......

13. 

IN CASE HE NEVER READS THIS

Dear Ali,

I’m writing this in a language my mouth never learned— the one between listening and belonging. I don’t know if this is a letter or just a trembling that needed a shape.

You don’t know me.

But somewhere between your tanpura and my pulse, we’ve already met.

And I have carried your voice inside mine like a talisman that doesn’t protect— just reminds.

That I have a name,even when no one says it.

That I have a wound, and it can hum.

Your songs were never background. They were the room. And I sat there for months, cross-legged on the carpet of your voice, undoing my silences thread by thread.

You gave me Lahore, without needing to cross a border.

You gave me the word “ishq”, without needing to say who it was for.

You let me ache without performance.

You made sorrow soft.

You did not sing to rescue me.

You sang to name me.

And in a world that demands sharpness, you chose tremble. You chose dusk. You chose to dress your longing in perfume and raag instead of rage.

And that, Ali—

that is a kindness I will never forget....

Ali,

you taught me that sometimes we do not heal.

We echo. And in those echoes— we find each other.

This is not gratitude.

This is something slower.

Like how perfume lingers after the wrist forgets the touch. Like how a song stays in the chest long after it has stopped being sung.

Because you were never just a singer to me.

You were the permission I needed to be soft and still survive.

And some nights, when the moon forgets its name, I call it Ali.

Because even silence, when sung right, can remember us back to ourselves.

I do not want to meet you.

Because how do you meet a voice

that already knows the shape of your quiet?

I do not want you to read this.

Because then I would have to believe that something so tender could reach.

Instead, I will keep this letter in my chest,

beside all the songs I never sent.

And if you ever wonder who was listening—

just know: I was.

EPILOGUE: LAHORE, BURNING SOFTLY 

The songs ended, but the silence didn’t.

Ali walked out of the room, but his voice stayed—folded between my ribs, humming in a tongue older than apology.

This is what remains:

Not clarity. Not healing.

But a faint scent of rosewater on the edge of sorrow’s breath. 

In another life, I think we all sat beside a harmonium, asking grief to stay a little longer,because it finally had a name.

Ali didn’t save me.

He remembered me. And that was enough.