To gild the disco ball

He arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) with the self-belief only an only child of musicians can afford. Siliguri was behind him; and so was Alokesh Lahiri. This is the story of Bappi Lahiri - and the misé-en-scene of a city of cracked pavements, late-night studios and impatient producers awaits him. The gold came much later, though. Not suddenly, not as myth suggests, but bit by bit, until he seemed to carry his own spotlight. Cameras didn't so much film him as bounce off him.

He grew up in a Bengali house the walls of which were laced - infested, even - with classical music. Melody was not inheritance; discipline was. His parents - Aparesh and Bansuri Lahiri - gave him the training that steadied his hand when the film industry demanded speed. He played the tabla by three, composed soon after, and, for all the sequins that trailed him later, he carried those early lessons with a certain sobriety. In 1975, 'Zakhmee' put his name in the room. It stayed there, circling, until 'Disco Dancer' blew the roof off and left him impossible to ignore.

People speak of the gold first. They always do. The necklaces, thick and unapologetic, as though he trusted metal more than fabric. But the shine distracts from the truth: he was a quiet worker. A man who could sit in a studio for hours without complaint, adjusting a single bassline until it behaved. He adored Elvis Presley. Not as a borrowed persona, but as permission. Presley told him a musician could be loud without being careless, dramatic without being insincere. So the gold stayed. So did the sunglasses. The weathered soul of Bombay may have smirked - perhaps mocked - him, but it could never look away.

The music, though, is what held. A plainspoken clarity ran through his biggest hits: 'Chalte Chalte', 'Bombay Se Aaya Mera Dost' and the un-feign-ably intimate 'Inteha Ho Gayi'. Hooks strong enough to travel from cassettes to wedding bands to nightclub remixes without losing their shape; melodies that sounded simple because he had done the hard work beforehand: these were the marquee inventions of the Bappi Da method - to take the flashy silver disco ball; and gild it in the regality of gold. In interviews, he'd sometimes close his eyes before answering, as if listening for a pitch the rest of the room couldn't hear.

His comeback wasn't really a comeback. Younger producers simply kept reaching into the drawer where his tunes were stored - sampling, lifting, bending them into new decades. He didn't protest. He liked that music lived multiple lives. He knew the industry had a short memory for faces and a long one for refrains.

When he died in 2022, the tributes drifted between affection and caricature. People remembered the gold, the grin, the strange comfort of hearing his voice announce himself in his own songs. But the truer picture is smaller: a man sitting close to a keyboard, shoulders slightly hunched, trying to coax a tune into cooperating.

A man who gilded what he touched, sometimes literally, mostly not.