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He was known as the four-candle man, because in the days before clocks, he would light four candles one after another and practice for as long as they burned. During one such session, when one of the candles was halfway down, a relative burst into his room and said that Imdad Khan’s daughter was very ill and he needed to see her immediately. Dada replied that his candle was still burning, so he
couldn’t leave yet. With the next candle, the same thing happened. Midway into the third candle, the girl died. Imdad Khan never forgave himself for being remiss as a father, but his ruthless commitment to music remained unchanged. It is said that he had done the famous forty-day chilla, a rigorous and exhaustive ritual where the musician doesn’t leave the house for forty days and only practices music.
Vilayat Khan was raised a Muslim, and was rarely without his prayer beads, but his devotion to the goddess Parvati embodied in raga Bhairavi was purer and more intense than any Hindu priest could have mustered.
He could tell if there was something amiss in a car’s alignment merely by listening to the purr of the engine, such was his relationship with sound.
His Master’s Voice in Mumbai which became one of the most beautiful instrumental duets of all time. The record was titled A Night at the Taj. The raga was Chandni Kedar and they were accompanied on the tabla by Nizamuddin Khan.
Gandhar, ‘I have seen a lot of sorrow in my life but all this sorrow that has lived inside me has to come out somewhere, so it comes out in my music. To make others cry through your music, you have to have cried a lot yourself. The music and the tears, they both come from the same place.’
There is a saying in the Sikh holy book: ‘Daeda dae laidae thaki pahi.’ You must give so much that the receiver himself gets exhausted. Whatever Vilayat Khan asked for was given without hesitation—money, adulation, love—until Khansahib himself wanted nothing.
But I never let it come in the way of music. If your heart is not in your practice, don’t bother sitting there. Stop playing, get up and go indulge your distracted mind. Then come back and sit. With proper devotion.’
music. He also admired the absence of fear and hesitation in him, and his straightforward professionalism, so unlike the Indians he had encountered back home, where there was always unctuous adulation and over-the-top displays of respect, but no one could really be fully trusted.
