Acclaimed for her work at the intersection of music, poetry, and ritual, ganavya – described by The New York Times as “the singer whose work feels like prayer” – shares a new song, ‘madi’, released via all digital platforms. Following the critical praise for her albums ‘Daughter of a Temple’ and ‘Nilam’, ‘madi’ offers another intimate glimpse into ganavya’s world, where music is both memory and meditation.

‘Tāyiṉ maṭi’, the song begins. A mother’s ‘madi’, a mother’s lap. “Aching like a mother’s lap,” the song whispers. The Tamil word ‘madi’ has so many meanings, that the weight of them all put together can break a heart.

‘Madi’, the Tamil word for lap, is also the Tamil word for folding: folding of a spirit, the fold of a stomach, folding of clothes. The soft pleats of a well-worn sari is called ‘madi’, as is the lap of a mother, the lap of her mother, the lap of a grandmother. ‘Madi’ somehow also means ‘to perish.’ It means ‘to be broken,’ to ‘be destroyed.’ ‘Madi’ can also mean ‘loneliness.’

“Women in my family refuse to starch their sari-s,” ganavya says. “It may make us look disheveled, but we do this because they choose softness over appearance. A soft lap for a resting head. Music, too, can be soft cloth,” she says.

This is a lullaby for unnameable loss, for a story of love that cannot be told, a song that sits on the edge between mourning and celebration. It is a song that is an essay in aching, a meditation on grief and dreaming. A lap, a stomach, a loss, sadness, loneliness. To grieve a loss that cannot be understood by anyone else, except the child in your heart. It is a song of bending down to pick up a flower banished from temples, to give the flower a gentle look before braiding her back into our hairs.

The song is an echo of love songs from the past, a study of grief that has been as old as time, while still believing love is older than time itself.