It could have been a trick of the light, but just for a second the son looks exactly like the father. Shahid Rafi has been recalling precious moments in the house he grew up in. He remembers the huge table in the dining room. Ammi is running around it, chasing her errant sons with a slipper in her hand. Abba, who has just pointed out his sons’ mischief to her, is sitting and watching them — and beaming broadly.

“Like this,” says Shahid, with a grin splayed on his face, looking just like Mohammed Rafi. It’s a smile that you’ve seen in numerous photographs — on the face of a man who, 31 years after his death, is still revered for the magic that his voice wielded. “There was always a smile on his face.”

Shahid, the youngest and only surviving son of the Hindi film industry’s most prolific male singer, seeks to capture all those moments in a book that Om Books International plans to launch by the year-end. “So far, no one has written a comprehensive book about the life and music of Rafisaab,” says its co-author Sujata Dev. “Shahidbhai has for the first time opened up to talk of things not known.”

It’s easy to slip into the past on a cloudy day in Mumbai, sitting in Rafi Mansion — the house where the playback singer lived with his wife, four sons and three daughters. Even though the Bandra bungalow has now been turned into flats, it’s not difficult to imagine it as Rafi’s world. This was also where he suffered a heart attack which took his life when he was 55.

Rafi’s life, indeed, is like a legend. The son of a barber from Punjab, he moved with his family to Lahore. He learnt music for a short while from Abdul Wahid Khan and Bade Ghulam Ali. But it was his elder brother, Shahid stresses, who encouraged him to go to Mumbai. A family friend took charge of him there, introducing him to composers. By 1942, the man with the golden voice had got his first break.

His legion of fans has it that he sang 25,000 songs, perhaps even more than what Lata Mangeshkar is believed to have sung. Dev points out that some 5,000-odd songs have so far been identified, but the rivalry between the Rafi and Lata camps has been an enduring one. The claim that Lata had sung the highest number of songs — published in the Guinness Book of World Records — was challenged by the Rafi camp. With no hard evidence from either side, the book of records finally decided to drop the entry.

The two singers — arguably India’s best known playback voices — had a difference of opinion on royalty as well. In the mid-Sixties, Lata had raised the demand that singers be given a performer’s royalty. Rafi — who believed the singer’s role was over once the song had been recorded — demurred, creating a rift that is still talked of.

The two didn’t sing together for a while, and folklore has it that composer S.D. Burman persuaded them to take part in a duet. “That’s what’s said, but I think (composers) Kalyanji-Anandji got them to sing together again,” Shahid suggests. “It was, however, S.D. Burman’s song that became more popular,” he says, and starts humming the Rafi-Lata duet from the 1967 film Jewel Thief — Dil pukare, aa rey, aa rey, aar rey…

His voice reminds you of Rafi, but curiously neither Shahid nor any of his brothers sang while he was alive. Unlike a great many singers whose offspring went on to become singers — think Amit Kumar and Nitin Mukesh — Rafi didn’t want his sons to take up music, and encouraged them to stick to business.

“Perhaps that was because he wanted us to be as good — or better,” reasons Shahid, who has a garment business but started singing on stage four years after his father’s death, encouraged to do so by his friends. “People say I sound like him — but I think he was way beyond. You just can’t compare any voice with his.”

The sons had very little to do with the industry. As young boys, one after the other they were packed off to London. The eldest three lived there almost all their lives. But Shahid returned to India after graduating in science when he was still in his teens, using the wedding of one of his sisters as an excuse to get back home.

Home was where his father used to sing, before he started rehearsing at the studios. Rafi wasn’t fond of socialising. “His life was his work and family. Even when he went for a wedding, he would keep his car outside the gate, give his bouquet and come back. So there were no parties in our life. Dad wouldn’t have known what a cocktail was.”

His father, the son adds, was a God-fearing man, so much so that once, after a pilgrimage to Mecca in the Seventies, he decided never to sing again. “Some elders told him there, ‘Rafisaab, what are you doing? This is against our religion.’ So he got scared and stopped singing.”

Rafi went to London and refused to return, much to the consternation of the industry. Finally, his sons — the eldest of whom was almost 20 years older than Shahid — persuaded him to start singing again. “God has given you this voice, they said. So you have to go back. You’ll sit for four months, five months, six months — and then what? He came back and sang several songs that went on to become super-duper hits.”

Shahid, 49, has an engaging way of speaking — switching from English to Urdu and Hindi and back with equal ease. In a white chikan kurta and pyjama, he is on a Ramzan fast, but seeks to give the impression that he has all the time for you. His wife, Firdaus, pretty as a picture, comes in with cups of green tea. She belongs to a family of famed sitar players — Vilayat Khan was her mother’s uncle, and Rais Khan is her mother’s brother.

The flat is simply furnished, and seems to echo Rafi’s well-known fondness for all that was unostentatious. “He was a very modest man. He used to say about his voice, ‘I am not the one singing; it’s not my voice. This has been given to me by God.’”

For the sons, he was abba when they addressed him, or dad when they talked about him. “We never thought of him as a great musician. All we knew was that he was our dad. Someone would say, you are Rafisaab’s son. I would say, theek hai, main hun, main kya kar sakta hu (I am, what can I do about it)?” Shahid laughs, and then adds, “When someone is alive, you don’t understand his worth. You realise it once he is gone.”

Rafi’s stature, he stresses, hits him all the time now. Every year, his fan clubs have been growing. Dev points out that the most Internet and mobile downloads are of Rafi’s song. The man who sang bhajans with as much ease as he crooned romantic songs or belted out rock ’’ roll is even worshipped as a god.

At a show in Asansol in 1985, Shahid found his father’s portrait next to that of a goddess. “People there said: ‘Every morning, we do Rafisaab’s puja before we worship our gods. That’s because we believe Saraswati rests in him.’”

Another fan from Ahmedabad has turned his room into a shrine with Rafi’s photographs, portraits and even some of his belongings — including a dressing table. He picked up some soil from the Mumbai cemetery where Rafi lies buried and placed it in his room. “He calls it Rafisaab’s mazhar,” says Shahid.

“He has no other god, he says. He has even been beaten up for saying that the love he has for him, he doesn’t have for his god. He believes that when people visit his shrine, their wishes come true,” Shahid exults.

To keep Rafi’s legacy alive, Shahid has set up a music institute called The Rafi Academy. “It will teach everything — from Hindustani classical to Western to hip-hop, everything. We are talking to quite a lot of people.” The academy may start functioning before Rafi’s birth anniversary on December 24.

But right now, Shahid has gone back 31 years to recall the day he died. It was July 31 and Rafi was at home, rehearsing a Bengali song that he was to record, when he suddenly collapsed. “I was in Mumbai with him when he passed away,” he says.

Dev remembers tears rolling down her father’s cheeks as he read the newspaper on the morning of August 1. “I think the headline said ‘Rafi no more’,” she says.

One day recently, though, Shahid had a nostalgic moment when he met an agitated young Rafi fan. “I told my father: You lied to me, you said Rafisaab was dead. But he is alive,” Shahid quotes the young boy as saying. The boy, of course, was referring to Shahid, who from many angles indeed looks like his father.

But he wasn’t very wrong: Rafi, after all, never died.