It's not every childhood home that can double as a training ground for singing 600-year-old Indian and Pakistani verse about unrequited love.

But Juno Award-winning singer Kiran Ahluwalia says her role as one of the few people in the Western Hemisphere composing and singing new music for traditional ghazals can be traced back to her family home.

"My parents were hobby ghazal singers," Ahluwalia says, going on to describe a family setting that bears passing resemblance to a kind of Hollywood Bollywood scenario.

"They didn't perform (publicly), but they learned the music through their child- and young adulthood — and they would have musical parties, in India and then in Canada, where like-minded friends would sit around after dinner and sing ghazals, and other music as well.

"So I basically grew up with it.”

The 40-year-old singer's soaring and frequently haunting vocals give full range to Punjabi folk songs, ghazals and now Portuguese fado (a close emotional relative to the ghazal).

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Ahluwalia took private lessons in classical Indian music ("99 percent improvisation," she says) before immersing herself in the early 1990s for a year and a half of intensive training in ghazal singing from a legendary guru of the genre, Vithal Rao, one of the last living court musicians of the Nizam (King) of Hyderabad.

Ahluwalia, who was born in Northern India and eventually moved to Toronto with her family in the mid- 1970s, still visits Rao once a year for lessons.

"He sings, and then it's up to you to figure out what there is to learn from him and how to learn it" she says.

"You very much have to be your own teacher."

Although ghazals themselves represent a traditional art form, Ahluwalia doesn't see her music quite that way.

"I don't really think of my music as traditional at all," she says. "I think of it as contemporary Indian-Canadian music.”

Ghazals may have originated centuries ago — one of the ghazals featured on her new third album, Wanderlust, was penned in Urdu in 15th-cenutry India, for example — but Ahluwalia finds the timelessness of their emotional content cries out for contemporary musical expression, using either the original texts or poetry of a similar sensibility written by a of prominent contemporary Indo- and Pakistani-Canadian writers.

"To me,” Ahluwalia says, ghazal music has always been contemporary.”

The singer’s ghazal studies in Mumbai and Hyderabad came after her undergraduate degree in industrial relations at the University of Toronto and a subsequent credit-union job, which she quit in 1990 in order to pursue her passion for Indian music.

Upon her return from India, she enrolled in the MBA program at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

Asked if the decision for post-graduate training in business represented strategic planning for building an international career in composing and performing ghazals, Ahluwalia replies, "I just didn’t feel like having a nine-to-five job.”

"Even at that time, I never dreamt I could have a career in music. I just wanted to continue being a student of music -- to wake up, practice, sing, and get better and better.

"So to get out of a nine-to-five — my parents weren’t going to be very happy if I loafed around doing music — I took my MBA.

"I didn't know anything about what was involved. I didn't even know the difference between advertising and marketing.”

But she does now.

"It has been extremely helpful in my life," Ahluwalia says, pointing out the obvious advantages of post-graduate business training in better understanding budgets and bottom-lines for recording projects and tours.

Her current round of concerts will take her to cities and festivals across Western Canada and the United States over the next four months. Though based for the past two years in New York with her jazz guitarist husband, Rez Abbasi, for whose band she does vocals, the peripatetic Ahluwalia says she performs in Canada so often "that I pretty well live in both places."

"And I still pay Canadian taxes," she adds, laughing.

By Bob Clark