It's Wednesday evening at the Royal Opera House. The guests are here to enjoy a tribute concert for Celia Lobo, graceful and charming even at 82. One of India's most prolific operatic singers, Lobo who starred in La Traviata, Rigoletto and Norma, is visiting Mumbai from San Francisco where she lives with daughter Deirdre. It could be her last trip to India, she says.

It's only fitting that the concert is scheduled in a neighbourhood where Celia grew up. It was here in Girgaum, surrounded by the Maharastrian community, that she inherited a love for the opera from her father Edwin. "It was a cosmopolitan neighbourhood, and I had a lovely childhood. My father was a singer and pianist, and would regale me with stories of the operas he had seen," she says, when we meet her a day before the event at her son, dancer Ashley Lobo's Juhu home. She is dressed in a turquoise sweater, with pearls around her neck. She is warm, and funny. Celia forgets what she is talking about now and then, but is mostly coherent and articulate. Often, she rolls her eyes at Deirdre's chatter, and offers a witty line.