HYDERABAD: The cafe is already loud when he arrives — cups clinking, chairs scraping, a low wash of conversation settling into the evening. He takes his place quietly, without introduction. No one turns. No one needs to. The first phrase lands, measured and unhurried, and the room recalibrates around it. Voices thin. Hands hover. The noise does not stop so much as it is organised.
Somewhere behind him, someone asks, softly, “Who’s playing?”
Anupam Kunapuli does not turn. He cannot see the question travel across the room. He registers it only as another sound moving through space, joining the others he is already shaping.
“Apart from being blind, I am half deaf also,” he says later, stating it with the same neutrality one might use for weather or traffic.
At 41, Anupam has built his life almost entirely through sound — not as compensation, but as method. He trusts it, tests it, and works it until it responds. Where circumstances once tried to narrow his choices, he learned instead to widen his listening.
His earliest memories are not of classrooms or playgrounds, but hospital corridors. Born with a rare intestinal disorder, he underwent surgery immediately after birth. Complications followed — retinal damage that took away his eyesight, a succession of operations over the years, blood-related complications, long recoveries, and, most recently, brain surgery. These facts exist in his life, but they do not organise it.
Music arrived early — and stayed.
When Anupam asked to learn the piano, teachers refused. Without sight, they said, notation would be impossible. His mother redirected him instead. “She turned me towards Carnatic music,” he recalls. “There, listening matters more than reading.”
What followed was not casual training but sustained, disciplined listening. Ragas were memorised not as scales but as living forms — absorbed, repeated, returned to until they settled somewhere deeper than recall. He learnt to hear micro-shifts in pitch, timing and phrasing — details many listeners pass over.
Jazz came later, and not through classrooms or textbooks. It arrived through people — mentors, fellow musicians, recordings exchanged hand to hand. When it did, it reorganised his musical thinking.
Notation loosened its hold. Structure became flexible. Improvisation took precedence over instruction.
“Jazz is freedom,” he says. “You don’t follow rules. You talk through music.”
For someone whose life had long been charted by medical reports and external limits, that mattered. Jazz did not ask him to see. It asked him to listen, respond and decide in real time.
Long before he performed professionally, Anupam was listening closely. Ray Charles. Stevie Wonder. Miles Davis. In their work, he heard not inspiration but assurance — that sound could carry emotion without explanation, that music could speak without asking permission.
“My biggest inspiration is Ray Charles,” he says. “His music feels like conversation.”
It is a concept he returns to often. Conversation. Call and response. Listening as much as playing.
Recognition came gradually, until an evening in Mumbai recalibrated things.
Invited by Louis Banks to perform at Mumbai Piano Day last year, Anupam walked towards the piano with assistance. Before he played a single note, the audience stood.
“I got a standing ovation before I even touched the piano,” he says, still sounding faintly surprised. “That moment — I will never forget it.”
It was not validation so much as acknowledgement: an audience already willing to listen on his terms.
In Hyderabad, Anupam is now a familiar presence across music spaces. From small cafes in Gachibowli to venues like ITC Kohenur, he performs most evenings. Often, he becomes the unseen architect of other people’s dinners, dates and half-heard conversations — shaping tempo, pacing and mood without drawing attention to himself.
Many listeners never realise the pianist setting the room’s emotional register has lived through repeated surgeries and setbacks. They only register the shift — that the evening feels more coherent than it did before.
Between performances, he practises daily, composes in his home studio, and experiments with blending jazz forms with Indian classical frameworks.
“If I don’t practise,” he says, smiling, “music will forget me.”
Offstage, his life is deliberately ordinary. Morning workouts. Yoga. Long walks with his father. A closely managed diet overseen by his mother. Swimming when time allows. Hours in the studio. Wrestling shows when he wants to switch his mind off. Long, unhurried conversations with friends.
He laughs easily. He does not frame his life as exemplary.
“I don’t want sympathy,” he says. “Just normal behaviour. Treat us normally. Learn from us and we learn from you.”
Like many independent musicians, he has known stretches when opportunities felt scarce — when familiar names filled performance slots and emerging artists waited.
He speaks of it without complaint.
“There are many talented musicians,” he says. “They just need opportunities.”
Looking ahead, Anupam wants to release new music, collaborate across India and abroad, expand his fusion work and eventually form a full band. One idea he returns to often is performing in complete darkness — jam sessions without lights, removing visual cues entirely, leaving musicians and audiences to rely only on sound.
“Music is conversation,” he says again. “One person talks, another listens. Eyes are not needed.”
Back at the cafe, he brings the set to a close. The final phrase is allowed to hang, unresolved, before he releases it. There is a pause — not uncertainty, but completion. Then the room exhales. Applause rises, uneven at first, then gathers.
Anupam does not see it.
But he has already finished what he came to do. He set the terms, shaped the silence, and left the room listening.
That has always been the point.