At the keyboard is 18-year-old Elham Fanoos, playing in a practice room at Hunter College in Manhattan. He has the long delicate fingers of a natural (as it turns out, a gifted) pianist. He sits perfectly erect, his dark eyes lowered. He seems at one with the music and an instrument that are a long way from his home in Afghanistan.
Fanoos was born in 1997, to a father who was a singer.
"At that time, under the Taliban, music was banned," Fanoos says. "My father was singing quite privately and he was practicing quite privately."