Two Extra Lives  ·  May 2026

THE IDEA

Two Extra Lives opened in Bandra with a conviction that a concept store could hold two things at once — a beautifully curated space for conscious fashion, and a living venue for culture. Not alternating between the two. Both, simultaneously, always. The garments we stock from niche designers around the world carry stories; so do the evenings we host. The two are not separate programmes. They are the same programme.

Bandra is the right neighbourhood for this kind of ambition. It is a place where the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist without ceremony — where a fisherman’s lane runs into an art opening, where music travels through walls at all hours and nobody finds it unusual. Our store was designed to belong to that energy, not merely to sit inside it.

Over the past two years, what has emerged is something we couldn’t have fully planned: a recurring cast of artists, musicians, craftspeople, and audiences who return not just for what’s on the rail, but for what might happen when the lights go down.

OUR SIGNATURE GATHERING

The word satsang comes from Sanskrit — a sacred gathering, a community of seekers. We borrowed it deliberately. Our Satsang evenings are not concerts in any conventional sense. There is no stage. There is no separation between the performer and the room. The music moves through the space and through the people in it, and something shifts.

It began in March 2024 with Ustad Rais Khan — a percussionist and folk musician from Rajasthan who is, among other things, one of the world’s foremost performers on the morchang, the jaw harp of Western India. To watch Rais Khan perform is to understand how one person, using voice, breath, mouth, and a small metal instrument, can conjure rhythms that feel both ancient and entirely alive. That first evening also included a traditional mehendi ceremony, thandai, and Rajasthani pagdis tied for guests — it was festive, intimate, and unlike anything Bandra had seen inside a clothes store.

What that first Satsang established was a template — not a format, but a feeling. The feeling that this store could be a room where the world comes in.

Since then, the Satsangs have brought in musicians from across continents and traditions. AllYellow Music, an international Afro-Latin live band born in Moscow in 2018, performed their blend of West African instruments — kora, n’goni, djembe, calabash — with rhythms that travel from Mali through Cameroon to Peru. The result was a dance floor in a clothing store that felt, improbably, like exactly where you needed to be.

Trippy Sama, a world music collective, performed twice in our space — first in November 2024 and again in February 2026. Their intention is explicit: to hold a sacred, inclusive space for all through sound. The bansuri and alghoza of Kartikeya Vashist, the sarod of Yash Nirwan, tabla, handpan, didgeridoo, voice. Their music doesn’t entertain so much as it envelops. Audiences have described leaving those evenings feeling lighter, as though the city outside had briefly paused.

In March 2026 came BeDesi — an ensemble of musicians from the Manganiyar and Langa communities of Rajasthan, among them Dare Khan Manganiyar, Latif Khan, Eklash Khan Langa, and Sawai Khan Manganiyar. These are families who have been musicians for generations; the kamayacha, sindhi sarangi, dholak, khartal, and matka they brought with them carry centuries of devotion, longing, and celebration inside their strings and skins. Hearing them perform inside a store in Bandra — the desert somehow present in a room surrounded by sea — was one of those evenings that people who were there will not easily forget.

THE CONVERSATIONS MUSIC MAKES POSSIBLE

Some of the most extraordinary evenings at Two Extra Lives have been the quieter ones — intimate acoustic sets where two musicians from entirely different worlds sit down together and discover a language only they could have invented in that moment.

In January 2026, we hosted three consecutive evenings that exemplified this. Motion/Emotion, led by Project Damru, brought together Hindustani classical, indigenous folk, and analogue electronics in one cinematic soundscape, with Hinoki’s voice drawing from ancient Japanese dreamscapes, Isheeta’s singing moving between Jazz and classical traditions, and Axel Moon — a Paris-based multi-instrumentalist — weaving oud and saz into the architecture of the evening. The following night, Axel Moon performed solo: a journey through rock, traditional folk, and forward-leaning electronic music, blending unusual sounds and his own edits into a narrative that felt like a conversation with many cultures at once.

Akram Abdulfattah, a Palestinian-American violinist who has collaborated with Simon Shaheen, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and Bassam Saba, brought something else entirely — a deeply meditative classical evening where Palestinian, Arab, and Indian traditions dissolved into each other. His view of music as a means of communicating peace and serenity was palpable in the room. People sat very still.

In May 2026, we hosted a duo that felt like a natural extension of this spirit: guitarist Neil Mukherjee — who has worked in studios with AR Rahman and Shankar Ehsaan Loy, and whose musical roots run from Kolkata’s rock scene into Carnatic classical — alongside percussionist Umesh Warbhuvan, whose hands carry both Indian and African rhythmic traditions. Their evening was billed as a conversation between continents. That is precisely what it was.

April brought Sanjay Divecha and Anand Bhagat — guitarist and percussionist, a duo whose chemistry has been built over years of playing together. The word people reached for afterwards was healed. Not entertained. Healed. That is the kind of evening our store can hold when the right musicians walk through the door.

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MUSIC AS MOVEMENT

Not every evening at Two Extra Lives asks you to be still. Some ask you to move.

Boombay Djembe Folas, shaped by percussionist Anand Bhagat, arrived in December 2025 with a simple proposition: West African folk rhythms, tribal drums, tribal energy, and an absolute insistence on joy. An evening that begins with the Djembe Folas tends to end with the walls sweating. They are the kind of collective that pulls everyone in — the people who came to listen and the people who came to stand in the back of the room — until there is no back of the room left. Everyone is in it.

Pink Moss, Mumbai’s own Alternative R&B, Funk, Neo-Soul, and Afro-Pop outfit — Sampriti on vocals, Souvik on bass, Subid on guitar, Sid on drums — brought that same kinetic energy in February 2026 with something more contemporary. Their bilingual lyrics and groovy rhythms sit squarely in the present, in the city, in this moment of Mumbai’s music scene. Having them perform inside Two Extra Lives felt like the store acknowledging what’s happening on the streets outside its own door.

And then there was The Unkle Whisky Collective in September 2025 — raw, moving country and blues, a coalition of musicians who came together out of a shared love for music’s ability to carry emotion that words alone cannot. Their evening was one to sway and spin to. The bittersweet essence of it lingered.

A SPACE THAT HOLDS STILLNESS TOO

There is a particular quality of silence that falls in a room when classical music is being played with real mastery. It is different from the silence of people being polite. It is the silence of people being completely present. We have been fortunate enough to create the conditions for that silence many times.

Alec Goldfarb — a Downbeat Magazine award-winning guitarist from Brooklyn and an exponent of the Seniya-Maihar Gharana — performed Hindustani classical music on the guitar using an adaptation of sitar technique that he developed himself. To hear raag and taal emerge from an electric guitar string is to be reminded that tradition is not a container but a living practice, capable of finding new forms without losing any of its depth.

Kaleidoscope, whose September 2025 evening explored the 20th-century transformation of Hindustani classical music through raga and tala, approached the same territory differently — honouring heritage while demonstrating that classical music is not frozen in amber. It is always becoming.

 

The most otherworldly evening may have been Sarah Cave’s in December 2024. A Korean-American violinist and music healer, Sarah MeeRan Cave began with an invocation to Mama Cacao, then led the room into a restorative sound bath on violin, viola, and voice. Tabla and percussion maestro Akshay Jadhav joined her for an improvised concert that invited people to move or to remain on the floor, letting the sound wash over them. Some people wept. Some people smiled continuously for two hours. Both responses seemed equally appropriate.

NOT JUST MUSIC

The cultural programming at Two Extra Lives has always extended beyond sound. In July 2025, we opened our first photography exhibition — WhatRemains. The show moved through the Anthropocene: awe-inspiring landscapes alongside quiet, haunting traces of what human impact is altering or erasing. It was not a comfortable exhibition. It was not meant to be. It was a space to hold grief and hope in the same breath, to stand inside images of the world and ask what we owe it.

In September 2025, we partnered with Ruchi’s Atelier for an upcycling workshop that was, in its own way, an act of philosophy. Every garment deserves at least two extra lives — that conviction lives at the core of what we do. The workshop made it literal: participants brought clothes they’d stopped wearing and left with pieces transformed by mending, stenciling, embroidery, creative repair. The idea that something worn and discarded can find new meaning is not only an environmental argument. It is an emotional one.

Earlier, in May 2025, our founder and stylist Anchal Notani transformed the store into an intimate atelier for a Styling Workshop — welcoming fashion students, creators, and lovers of thoughtful design to study, explore, and engage with our curated collection not as product but as material for thinking.

COMING NEXT

There is one more format we are building toward, and it is perhaps the most audacious of all: the Info Disco.

The idea is this — a night of dancing, of genuine joy and release, but with the walls alive with visuals that confront the realities of human overconsumption and the fragility of the planet. A dance floor that asks you to feel two things at once: the pleasure of being in your body, and the urgency of what our bodies are doing to the world around them.

We believe these two things do not cancel each other out. We believe a dance floor can hold both mirth and grief, both celebration and reckoning. The Info Disco is our attempt to create a space where the conversation about sustainability is not a lecture — not something you sit through — but something you move through, something that enters you through music and rhythm and then stays.

It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. And when it does, you’ll know this store for it.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Bandra already has venues. It has bars and clubs and gallery openings and open mics. It does not lack for places to go.

What we are trying to offer is something more specific: a space where the conversation between what you wear, what you listen to, and who you are feels genuinely held. Where the Palestinian-American violinist and the Rajasthani folk musician and the Mumbai neo-soul band and the Afro-Latin collective are not random bookings, but parts of a coherent argument — that culture is not a category, it is a commons. That curiosity across borders and traditions is not a luxury but a necessity. That a clothing store, of all places, might be one of the better venues in which to make that argument, because fashion has always been the art form closest to the body, the one most entangled with identity and heritage and the way we move through the world.

We are Two Extra Lives. The name has always been about second chances — for garments, yes, but also for evenings, for connections, for the moments when you walk into a room not knowing what you’ll find and leave changed by it.

Every evening we host, we believe, gives this city one more reason to feel alive.

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