When Ustad Nishat Khan describes his early childhood in Kolkata, he paints the picture of a home with an open door. His family residence was in the city's Park Circus area, on a road that's now called Ustad Enayat Khan Avenue after his grandfather. Some of the greatest sitar players to have ever graced the country have lived under that roof.

They include Khan's father, Imrat Khan, and his uncle, Vilayat. Music would be played within those walls all day long, he tells us, with the notes wafting out of the windows, sometimes attracting mesmerised passers-by who would invite themselves in to sit and listen. That's the setting in which Khan was raised. He was, in other words, born with a musical spoon in his mouth.