Salim Mirza

Salim Mirza grew up in a two-room house behind the qawwali hall on Nala Road, where his father played harmonium for hire at weddings and his uncle kept a shop of secondhand brass instruments, and by the age of seven Salim could name every trumpet in that shop by the dent in its bell. He got his first real horn at twelve, a battered cornet his uncle could not sell, and taught himself scales by copying the record player next door through the wall.

At sixteen he joined the Royal Star Wedding Band as the boy who carried the big drum, and within three years he had worked his way to trumpet, and within six he had the uniform coat with the braid, No. 4 stitched inside the collar in his own careful hand so that it would always come back to him from the communal cupboard where the coats were kept between seasons.

The band plays every season from October to February and again through the summer wedding rush, six, sometimes seven nights a week, down lanes barely wide enough for the tempo carrying the generator and lights. Salim leads from the front, coat unbuttoned in the heat, the trumpet raised so the sound carries over the drums, and for four hours on any given night he is, by his own account and by general agreement, the most important man in the procession.

At nineteen, on the advice of a cousin who knew a recordist, he travelled two hours by train to audition at a small film music studio, certain that this was the door through which he would walk into playback singing sessions and orchestra pits. The recordist listened to eight bars, thanked him, and told him his tone was too rough for playback work. Salim has told this story many times since, in many versions, and in the version he prefers, the recordist was a lesser player himself, jealous of a talent he could not match.

He has never gone back to that studio, nor to any other, and has instead built a small reputation of his own kind: brides' uncles who will not dance until Salim signals them to, a shehnai player two towns over who insists that Salim be hired alongside him or not at all, and a queue of neighbourhood boys who arrive at his door on Sunday mornings with borrowed trumpets and hopeful faces.

He teaches them for free and without gentleness, correcting a boy's breath with the flat of his hand against the ribs, making them hold a single note until the room seems to shake, and two of his students — Feroz, who plays now with a brass band in the next district, and young Altaf, barely twenty — are by common agreement finer players than their teacher. Salim mentions Feroz less than he once did, and does not mention Altaf at all, though he still gives him lessons.

He married Nasreen in 1979, and their three children have grown up backstage at a thousand weddings, sleeping on folded uniform coats while their father's trumpet sounded three streets away. His eldest son plays clarinet in the same band now, competently, without his father's fire, which suits Salim, who says a band needs steady men as much as it needs stars.

There is a particular corner of Nala Road, just past the flour mill, where the acoustics throw a trumpet's sound back twice as loud, and Salim always times the procession to pass through it at the loudest part of the tune, a small piece of stagecraft he has never explained to anyone and never will.

Walk behind the Royal Star band on any wedding night and you will see him at the front, coat gleaming under the borrowed lights, utterly certain of himself; walk beside him afterwards, coat over his arm, trumpet case swinging at his side, on the long quiet road home after the lights have been switched off and loaded onto the tempo, and you will find the loudest man in the procession has, for that stretch of road at least, remarkably little to say.