In 1999, on returning to India after 16 years in England, I began once more to listen to my old record collection.

It comprised, in large part, a once-beloved array of American singer/songwriters, British rock musicians, and a fastidious selection of the blues and jazz, all of which I had ostentatiously turned away from in the early 1980s as I grew more and more involved in north Indian classical music, and as my subterranean writerly aspirations began to become increasingly powerful, especially following my arrival in England.

Listening after almost two decades to Jimi Hendrix and others, I noticed what I had already realised in the late 1970s - when I played the guitar and had begun to learn the raga, and two or more musical systems had briefly overlapped in my life - that the pentatonic blues scale is identical to certain pentatonic ragas. This led to a sort of double hearing; the conscious mind was registering one sort of performance or form, and the subconscious was stirred to recall another.

Further, this created experiences of what I call “mishearings”: for instance, one morning, when I was practising the raga Todi, as I usually do at that time of day, I heard the riff to Clapton’s “Layla” in a handful of notes I was singing. I began to wonder, surreptitiously, whether some sort of hybrid musical vocabulary - distinct from the bringing-together we ordinarily associate with Indo-western “fusion” - might result from these “mishearings”.