Valentine Music Makers during rehearsals, with Russel D'Mello sitting on the far right

The world becomes a bit different for us when we turn right into a bylane, just in front of Vidyavihar station, to enter Kirla village around 9 pm on a Tuesday. It's an East Indian gaothan, a place we have never been in before. Narrow streets are lined with mostly two-storey tenements with their doors open, some with women in slacks and T-shirts chatting inside. The men on the streets walking around in shorts don't look as if they are about to go anywhere outside of the gaothan. It seems like a self-contained Christian settlement on the whole, except for some shopkeepers who are clearly non-Catholic, given the religious insignia they bear on their wrists and foreheads. And one of them points us in the direction we are seeking, towards the leader of an East Indian brass band, Russell D'Mello. Or "band-wala Russell", as the locals call him.