As one writes this review, Arooj Aftab is requesting audiences to vote for one of her latest releases, a collaboration with well-known sitar player Anoushka Shankar — daughter of celebrated American-Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and half-sister to jazz artiste Norah Jones — called Udherro Na, to be considered for a Grammy.

If she is successful, this would make it her third nomination. And if she wins, this would be a second Grammy under her belt. Third, if you count her first Latin Grammy (in 2020) in the best rap/hip hop category for contributing to Residente’s Antes Que El Mundo Se Acabe [Before the World Ends] as a backing vocalist.

The first was, of course, for winning Best Global Music Performance for her single Mohabbat earlier this year. It was based on the poetry of Hafeez Hoshiyarpuri, from her latest album, Vulture Prince.

Well, the gift that is Vulture Prince continues to keep on giving. Udherro Na is from a forthcoming deluxe edition of Vulture Prince that is soon to be released.

Arooj Aftab’s collaboration with Anoushka Shankar, Udherro Na, is as full of atmosphere as her Grammy-winning Mohabbat

“Udherro Na has been one of my dearest songs, written in 2005 and never released, played live on and off over the years,” Arooj said in a statement. “I’ve always held it close to my heart and am so happy to release it finally! It describes a very unique and fleeting emotional moment, a super underrated feeling. When the thought of someone from a very old and ‘passed’ relationship just pops into your head as you go about your present day to day.”

Udherro Na carries forward the dark, hauntingly beautiful atmosphere omnipresent in Mohabbat, an atmosphere that carries forward like a common thread in the whole Vulture Prince album. Anoushka Shankar’s delicate, lilting sitar-playing provides the perfect backdrop to Arooj’s soft vocals at the start of the song but it’s towards the middle, when the sitar goes solo, that it sings.

It may not have lyrics, but the performance on the sitar has been composed so beautifully you can feel the tension and the beauty move forward in waves towards a build-up and then a sudden release as Arooj delves into the main root of the song with the lyrical rendition of Udherro Na. This song tells as much of a story, a movement through emotions, through its music as it does through its lyrics.

It’s extremely heartwarming to see how far Arooj Aftab has come. Her’s has been a long, hard journey. She’s been at it for years. From putting up clips of her music online way back in 2001-2002, before there was even a Facebook or Instagram, to going viral for her cover of Aamir Zaki’s iconic song Mera Pyaar and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

She then received the Steve Vai scholarship at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2005, where she formally studied music production and engineering as well as jazz composition. After graduating, she continued to live and work in the United States and, in the midst of all of this, released three albums — Bird Under Water (2014), Siren Islands (2018) and Vulture Prince (2021) — while collaborating with other artists and working full time as an audio engineer to pay for her music.

Earlier this year, she was finally featured in Coke Studio, in a dark, soulful composition titled Mehram, opposite Asfar Hussain, the lead vocalist and songwriter from the rock outfit Karakoram. And soon after, won her (and Pakistan’s!) first Grammy. Here’s hoping her journey through Udherro Na takes her onwards and upwards.

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 30th, 2022