by Ayesha binte Rashid

“Kabhi Hum Khoobsurat Thhe by Nayyara Noor Jee,” Quratulain Balouch pauses. She closes her eyes and sighs, seems to withdraw into herself. A past sadness crosses her face for a moment. It is gone as quickly as it comes; the next moment she is smiling again. “I was missing my mom a lot. Like a lot. I think it was playing on T.V. That is the first memory of a song I connected with.”

Some people are given a gift by God, says Ali Sethi of Quratulain’s voice. “You hear her sing once and you can never forget her voice.” Quratulain is widely regarded as having a texture in her voice, a unique charisma that is characteristic of folk singers of the Subcontinent. But it is the melancholy in her voice, the depth of emotion and a particular kind of moodiness that gives her the ability to reach into people’s hearts and connect with them on a visceral level.

Quratulain’s story is one of human resilience. A bitter divorce between her parents led to her mother moving to the United States. Her father, a military man, was rarely stationed in one place for too long. Quratulain found herself living with her aunt and uncles, seldom seeing her father and separated from her mother. The situation, she remembers, led her to feel a sense of hollowness, a feeling of uncertainty much like she didn’t have a foundation beneath her feet.

School became a means of escape for Quratulain. She first began to find her voice reciting naats in school assemblies, and participating in debating competitions. As a young girl dealing with an emotional overload, she found that these activities helped her release some of the anger she was feeling as a necessary coping mechanism.

At the age of 18, after 15 years of separation, Quratulain was reunited with her mother. This, however, was not the end of her tribulations. In 2013, two years after she was first noticed for her rendition of Reshma Jee’s Akhiyaan Du Rehn De, her life took an unexpected turn that would define her path forever. Sitting in the back seat of a friend’s car, Quratulain met with a road accident that critically wounded her. The impact of the injury was focused on her neck and led doctors to believe that she may never be able to sing again. This awakened Quratulain’s passion for her craft. As she recovered, she worked incessantly on her voice, even at times when it hurt. Her efforts were not in vain. Today, she remains an iconic voice in the contemporary music scene. A voice that one pauses to hear - a voice that makes one wonder what sadness she continues to mask.

Today, Quratulain finds herself a product of her past still reconciling the idea of loss and joy. It is no wonder, then, that her voice is so filled with feeling – it is a voice that comes from the raw emotion inside her, unafraid and unbridled.

“If you keep listening to what the world is saying,” says Quratulain, “you become deaf to the voice that comes from within. And that is the most important voice for one’s existence.”

For all that she has been through, Quratulain has found solace in her music. Music, she says, has helped her to feel, it has made her emotions easier for her and helped her understand life. She refuses to take any credit for her own voice. “Iss mein mera koi kamaal nahin hai,” she keeps insisting (“I have no part to play in my own talent”). To her, the gift she has been given is worth more than anything that has been taken from her. A belief that is symptomatic of her faith in the universe: no matter what she faces, she knows if she jumps in headfirst and goes with the flow, she will emerge safely on the other side.

As house band member Sarmad Ghafoor so aptly puts it, “When you hear Quratulain sing, you imagine someone who has no inhibitions. Whatever she is doing, she is doing it with everything she’s got.”