As a child, Ali Sethi was enthralled watching Sufi whirling – a religious dance – at nearby shrines in Punjab: “There’s this collective catharsis that takes place and, briefly, your caste, class, gender, appearance, they stop mattering. You have licence in an otherwise extremely hierarchical society to just express yourself.”
This is something the 41-year-old Pakistani-American singer, songwriter and composer hopes to create himself. Though he’s also a writer – be that his acclaimed 2009 novel, The Wish Maker, or contributions to publications such as the New Yorker – music became somewhere Sethi could be accepted, especially as a queer person growing up in Lahore. “I think music has this shamanic function in south Asian culture,” he says, “where things you cannot say in lay language you say in the love language of music.”
