She doesn't wear cheeky crotch-skimmers and is not in the habit of displaying her pert posterior. Yet suddenly Norah Jones, of the breathy voice and exotic looks, is everywhere. Catch her accepting her five Grammys on TV (her album won three more), listen to her sing in her husky Nina Simone twang in a cameo in Sandra Bullock-Hugh Grant's Two Weeks Notice, now showing in India, and catch her father, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, chatting about being on tour with her and her mother, Sue Jones, his partner between 1974 and 1987.

All this without really trying-Britney, Kylie, take that.

ONE FROM THE ALBUM: Two-year-old Norah Jones with Pandit Ravi Shankar at the Taj, Mumbai (above); with half-sister Anoushka when she came to India in 2000

At 23, Jones-or Geetali Norah Jones Shankar, as she was before changing her name at 16-has become pop music's new thing. Having equalled the record of Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys for the most wins by a female artist in a single night, she beat Bruce Springsteen on his home turf of New York for album of the year. For the past 51 weeks, the album, Come Away With Me, has been on the Billboard charts, with her record company shipping out four million CDs-giving her four platinums. Don't Know Why, the hit song, has also featured in the Jennifer Lopez romance, Maid in Manhattan, released in the US last month.

She even comes with a simmering controversy, which contrarily, in the age of let-it-all-hang-out, she never addresses directly. Is she or is she not proud to be her father's daughter, even though he did not see her at all between the ages of 10 and 18? Her acceptance speech at the Grammys, where she did not mention Shankar at all, has excited much international comment, even from the venerable Daily Telegraph of London. And though she acknowledged to USA Today that she may be "genetically predisposed to play music", she chooses to directly credit her mother. "She never pushed me, but she's a real music lover and she presented me with the opportunities I wanted," she said.

Sukanya, Shankar's second wife and the woman who replaced Sue, is determined though that "Geetu" (as Shankar calls her) is part of the extended family. "She even tells me, it's creepy the way I look like you," says Sukanya, adding, "She does, doesn't she?" The way the Shankars tell her story, it goes like this: when Sue, Ravi Shankar's tour manager (not concert promoter, insists Sukanya) gave birth to Norah, he couldn't be there, but he went to New York bearing her nappies. Norah came to India when she was two and then again when she was four. They lost touch when Norah moved to Dallas with her mother, till she called their San Diego home when she was 16. At 18, Sukanya engineered her homecoming. "It was slightly awkward at first," acknowledges Shankar. And now, if one is to believe Sukanya, Norah loves to cook dal and rice, her way. "Last time I met her, she told me she'd run out of the masalas I had sent her," glows Sukanya.

LONE STAR: With her husky voice and ethnic looks, Norah Jones is pop music's dark horse

So did Norah never harbour any resentment against her largely absentee father? The couple falls silent for a while. "It is natural. There was a lot of anger from her mother. It took time for us to come close. And there was the guilt of all those years I had missed out on her," says the 83-year-old Shankar, who vociferously denies appropriating her, yet cannot stop commenting on how much she looks like him. Sukanya insists that it is they who introduced her to Shankar's and Anoushka's record label, EMI. And Shankar lets it slip that he introduced Geetu to her first piano teacher, Dr Lizl Barnett-and agrees with Sukanya when she says, "It's all in the genes."

From illegitimate anonymity to one of the Top 12 entertainers in Entertainment Weekly, "People of the Year" in the November issue of Rolling Stone and on the cover of Vanity Fair's music issue, along with A-listers like Sheryl Crow and Gwen Stefani, has been a journey the Shankars would have wished for their other adored daughter, Anoushka, who was nominated in the World Music award category but didn't win.

So who is Norah Jones? At 15, she enrolled in the Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. By 16, she had started off on her gigs and then entered the University of North Texas where she majored in jazz piano. More than that, she is down-to-earth, fun-loving and a great clown in private. The fame that has come her way in the past year has not changed her, although she went from playing to 50 people for brunch in a New York club to going to Europe and selling out 1,500-seaters. She continues to create music with the band she assembled two years ago, which includes her boyfriend of two years, Lee Alexander (the bass player who wrote the Lone Star song in the album) and did a music video only after immense persuasion from her company. Vijay Iyer, a Manhattan-based professional piano player who has done concerts (in the funk-fusion band Wax Poetic) with Norah, says, "She does exactly what she wants to do. The best thing about her is that she is not a studio concoction." Indeed. She told Rolling Stone: "I'm not a lady, I'm a guy. I'll fart with the best of them."

But she's a lot more than hot air.