“You look like you lost a song,” she said in a voice like a late-night radio host.

She opened her case and took out a harmonium, its wood worn smooth where hands had travelled it for decades. Without asking, she lifted it to her lap and began to play—a simple phrase, a call and answer, like a child asking for water then being given the sea.

At dusk, the same silver-haired woman, who introduced herself as Amma, gathered a ragtag audience: shopkeepers, a boy with a cricket bat, a sari-clad woman who had been humming the harmonium tune all afternoon. She placed the harmonium on her lap and began to sing, and one by one, others joined: a voice faltering, a chorus of clapped hands, an old man’s off-time tabla. The music was rough, earnest, and it filled the theater as if filling a glass to the brim.