I first heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in a bar in Brussels sometime in the year 1994. I hadn’t heard Nusrat’s incredible voice with its amazing range and variations ever before; he was not such a hit in India at that point in time. Though unbeknownst to me, he was already big in the US and making inroads in Europe. This was a bar with a pocket-sized dancing floor; possibly a barn or a warehouse once it had been converted into a high-end watering hole in a hip part of Brussels.
What I remember all these years later is that people around us were tapping their feet and dancing to the music, and possibly, they were people who did not understand a word of what Nusrat was saying, and perhaps only two people in the room, my husband and I, who could understand Nusrat, were neither dancing nor tapping our feet. Looking back, I see that as a moment of epiphany where I understood what Qawwali means to people like us, those of us who are born and brought up in South Asia.