The rain is heavy, the roads are waterlogged and the traffic is chaotic. My car’s moving at a pace that makes the proverbial snail seem like Schumacher. When I finally reach Sainik Farms in south Delhi I am 45 minutes late for my appointment with violinist L. Subramaniam.

The lady with the amazingly sweet and familiar voice who ushers me in shows no signs of annoyance. But then, Subramaniam’s wife — playback singer Kavita Krishnamurthy — is known to be pleasant. She smiles warmly, leads me to a sofa and then leaves the room.

I am trying to ingratiate myself with Jelly the spitz when I hear a voice behind me. “Do you like dogs,” Dr Subramaniam asks as he quietly walks into the room. His voice is gentle, as is his demeanour. The violinist — renowned across the world for his music — is as polite as his wife. Though he has an appointment, he gives no indication that he’s in a hurry and that I’ve upset his plans.

The man who’s occasionally referred to as the Paganini of Indian classical music is stylishly attired in a half-sleeve white kurta with a saffron Nehru jacket and a pair of grey trousers. As he settles down on a sofa in his sister-in-law’s house, I notice the three gold rings on his fingers. One has an emerald set in it, and another, he tells me, is a navagraha, which has the blessings of all nine planets. “Both were plucked out of the air and gifted to me by Sathya Sai Baba when I performed before him,” says this ardent follower of the self-styled godman.

Subramaniam has performed before artistes and statesmen, and with the best of musicians. Among them was American violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin. “Way back in 1986, I received an invitation from his office to perform at his 70th birth anniversary in Germany. I immediately accepted the invitation to represent Asia in the concert,” says Subramaniam.

After the performance, Menuhin walked up to the stage and hugged Subramaniam. “He told me that he had never heard such a powerful composition before,” he recalls.

On another occasion, Subramaniam recalls how Menuhin had appreciated a khadi kurta that the Indian violinist was wearing. They were at the United Nations, performing together for India’s 40th year of independence. “I was carrying an extra kurta with me, so I gifted it to him. After our solo performances, when we were about to play a duet, I was pleasantly surprised to see him come up on stage wearing the kurta,” says Subramaniam with a smile.

Subramaniam has music in his veins. His father V. Lakshminarayana was a violinist and mother V. Seethalakshmi a veena player. “My parents are my gurus,” he says. Since his father was a professor in the department of music in Jaffna College, Subramaniam spent his initial years in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon.

At 63 — and after 150 recordings — the sparkle in his eye is hard to miss when he talks about his first solo performance when he was six years old. “One evening, my father was performing with my two elder sisters — Brahanayaki and Subbalakshmi, who accompanied him in vocals, at the famous Subrahmanya temple in Jaffna. Suddenly my father insisted that I also perform on the same dais,” he says. The organisers were not very keen — and neither was he. “I was extremely scared of performing before two lakh people.”

But the tiny violinist set the stage on fire — and the audience was spellbound. “The organisers were so impressed that they asked me to keep playing,” he says.

When Subramaniam was 11 his family moved to Chennai as ethnic violence broke out in the region in 1958. In India, he formed a group called the Trio with his violinist brothers L. Vaidyanathan and L. Shankar. At 16, he received the President’s award, and nine years later, was conferred with the title of Violin Chakravarthy (Emperor of the Violin) by the then Governor of Tamil Nadu, K.K. Shah. Many more accolades came his way, including the Padma Shri in 1988 and Padma Bhushan in 2001, as he started experimenting with Carnatic and western classical music, to which he was exposed when he went to California for a postgraduate degree in his mid-20s.

This was his first formal degree in music. Before that, he’d studied medicine from the Madras Medical College. “My parents insisted on formal education. And since I was extremely fond of science, I studied medicine. But I never practised it, because music was the only career for me,” he says.

Subramaniam has also composed music for a few films, including those directed by Mira Nair and Bernardo Bertolucci. “When Mira approached me for Salaam Bombay in 1988, I insisted that I watch the movie first. I was moved by its concept and immediately took up the project,” he says. Subsequently, he composed the score for two of her other films — Mississippi Masala (1991) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996). He was the composer for Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993) and the Merchant-Ivory production Cotton Mary (1999).

“I am selective about films because I actively perform on stage,” says Subramaniam, who was also the musical adviser to Peter Brook for his epic Mahabharata in the early 1980s.

The conversation has just warmed up when Krishnamurthy reminds him that they have to leave for another meeting. I decide to move away from music to matters more personal. How did he meet Krishnamurthy?

“I never followed Hindi film music, so didn’t know Kavita till we worked together for a musical project in 1999,” he says with a smile. Soon, the two started meeting outside of work.

Then once, when he was travelling in Japan, he realised how much he missed her. “I missed her so badly that I called her from there and proposed to her,” he says somewhat shyly. The two got married in 1999.

Subramaniam was married earlier, and has four children from his first wife who died in 1995 after a long illness. All four are involved with music or literature. The eldest, Gingger, plays with her legendary violinist uncle Shankar in Los Angeles, while the other three live with their father and Kavita in Bangalore.

“Narayana (the elder son) is pursuing medicine and writes poetry. Bindu (the younger daughter) is writing her own songs, so she’ll soon have her own album. She also performs with Kavita. And Ambi (the youngest, at 19) plays with me,” says the proud father. Ambi will join him in Chicago for this year’s Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival — the concert that he started in 1992 in memory of his father — which opens on September 10. The festival will continue for a year to mark his father’s birth centenary celebrations in 2011. Subramaniam is writing a composition for a full symphony orchestra as a tribute to his father.

But while Chicago has its charms, the violinist is swayed by the “emotional” audience of Calcutta. “Calcutta has the most cultured audience in our country,” declares Subramaniam, who has performed at the Dover Lane Musical Conference in the city on a couple of occasions and at various other festivals.

He has performed in more than 50 countries, including Iceland, but is yet to visit neighbouring Pakistan. He points out that he composed a ghazal that Pakistani singer Ghulam Ali sang in a duet with Krishnamurthy for the album, Mahiya, in Punjabi. “I want to perform in Pakistan but I am yet to get an invitation from there,” he sighs.

Meanwhile, he is busy with his concerts in India and abroad. He is also looking forward to an open air performance slated to be held at the Nehru Park in Delhi later this month.

“The stage is the ultimate place of solace,” says the ever enthusiastic artist. Now Kavita — pleasant as she is — won’t let him dawdle any more. They leave and I step out into the rain, as a plaintive violin plays in my head. It’s time for a long journey home.