When she was 2 days old in India, a hospital nurse poked her with an unsterilized needle, injuring her left hip socket. It never properly formed.

Trying to negotiate uncleared sidewalks in North York, where she worked as an architect, became so painful last winter that she quit. While recovering, she revived an old interest. She hired musicians, took a crash course in recording and this fall released an album of 16th-century love poetry to the Hindu deity Lord Krishna.

She also performed publicly for the first time in years – in Mississauga and Richmond Hill – attracting interest from programmers at the Small World Music Festival and Harbourfront Centre.

"Those poems demand (musical) composition," she says of the boldly romantic writings of the celebrated Rajasthani figure Meera Bai. "They demand that somebody should sing them."

Vishwas, 39, was born in Lucknow and grew up in central India. From an early age, she displayed vocal talent. At 4, she could sing such complex melodies that her parents enrolled her in a classical music institute. At 16, she earned an Indian classical music degree.

Afterward, she sang on national television and All India Radio, winning attention from Bollywood – a childhood dream – and a chance to work as a playback singer for Bollywood films. "But Bombay was not easy for me," she recalls wistfully, "riding on local trains and jumping off (at the stop). Life was too fast. I was struggling."

In the meantime, Vishwas completed an architecture degree, and met and married another architectural student, Vishwas Thoke. "Architecture balances art and technology – that's why I like this field," she says.

In 1997, to advance their careers, the couple moved to Dubai. In the oil-rich Gulf, they joined the construction frenzy of glamorous hotels, office towers, clubs and villas. "Even the villas were big projects," she says.

But the work left no time for music, and in Dubai every foreigner is a visitor. Settling permanently was not an option. In 2002, they came to Canada. Both joined architecture firms, Vishwas continuing with large construction projects, including such landmark lakefront condominium projects as Waterpark City: Phase 1, on Fleet St., and the Maple Leaf Square twin towers, rising behind the Air Canada Centre.

Of Canada, she says: "Here you don't feel you are in a foreign country. People accept you."

Vishwas titled her CD Meera: the Lover. Her songs tell the story of poet Meera Bai articulating the various phases of her feelings for Lord Krishna, from innocent devotion, to romantic passion, to a state of spiritual trance.

The themes are the outsized Bollywood kind: struggle, resilience, the power of love. But it is Vishwas's vocal technique, and tenderness toward melody and lyric, that bring the songs to life.

"The storytelling is innovative and accessible," Small World Music director Alan Davis says of Vishwas's handling of the material. "We're looking to place her in our (2010) South Asian series."

Harbourfront music programmer Alok Sharma said Vishwas was also on his radar.

Touring remains out of the question, Vishwas says. After the spring, she intends to go back to helping shape Toronto's skyline.