Beryl 45

Her story

Beryl is forty-five and has sung at the same Colaba jazz club since she was twenty-five. She grew up in an Anglo-Indian house in Bandra where the radio was never off, learned to read music from her grandmother's piano and has never once sung the same song the same way.

She is a curvy woman with honey-gold pin curls, hazel eyes, a ruby lip and a beauty mark above it, always in velvet and ruby drops. Regulars say she can quiet a room by taking a breath.

You sat at the corner table, ordered one whisky and slipped a request across to the piano: the song nobody ever asks for. She read it, glanced up, and dimmed the stage lights herself.