When the message moved across the country—swift as a monsoon wind—that Assamese singer Zubeen Garg’s voice had fallen quiet, Kahilipara swelled like a lane turning into a stream. Outside his Guwahati doorway, faces glimmered, hands folded in namaskar, and low murmurs curled upward until they became song. No announcements were needed. People simply arrived—arms full of marigolds and memories—bringing with them a heavy, generous hush that said everything sorrow could not.
The sea kept its hush, then turned unkind. In Singapore, during a routine scuba dive that should have ended in applause later that night, Zubeen slipped into trouble beneath the blue. He was 52—on the road for the North East India Festival, slated to sing on September 20 and 21—carrying a repository of melodies and a state’s affections. His sudden departure left us all in a state of shock and disbelief.
Mid-dive, his breath betrayed him. Guides pulled him from the water, palms working urgently at his chest as the waves clapped a worried rhythm. CPR began on the shore, hope rising and falling with each compression, and an ambulance cut a path to Singapore General Hospital. Every effort was made to save his life, but fate had a different plan.
By the time he reached the doors, the silence had already settled. Doctors fought the clock and then stopped it: at 5:14 PM Singapore time—around 2:30 PM in India—they pronounced him gone. The room dimmed without the lights changing; a continent away, phones lit up with messages that didn’t know how to say it. The collective grief of the public was palpable, uniting us in our shared loss.
The protocol followed grief. Zubeen’s body was sent for autopsy, the official language taking notes while the unofficial language—prayers, playlists, stories told twice—carried him homeward in the only way we know: by repeating his songs until the ache learns their tune.
The night air over the Delhi International Airport tarmac moved like a held breath. A cargo door yawned open, the conveyor hummed, and a flag-draped casket emerged—heavy as a chorus, light as the hush that fell over everyone waiting.
He was Zubeen da to almost everyone—family by nickname, legend by labor. Born in Tura, Meghalaya, in 1972, he spent three restless decades refusing to live in a single frame: singer, songwriter, actor, director—opening new doors as if every room of art were his by birthright. In the Northeast, he didn’t just top playlists; he set the weather.
On the afternoon of September, far from the Brahmaputra, his last journey began in Singapore. He had flown there as a Cultural Brand Ambassador for the North East India Festival, the tricolour at his back and a thousand hometown hopes in his carry-on. That he should leave us while carrying the region’s music abroad feels like a final, stubborn act of love—Assam spoken to the world, and the world listening.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stepped forward, palms joined, the cameras momentarily irrelevant. In that wordless minute, a state met its loss face to face and received the body of Zubeen Garg, the voice that could lift a tea garden’s dawn and turn a city’s traffic into a humming choir. The government would soon formalize what millions were already doing on instinct: it declared three days of State mourning.
He had died far from home, beneath a foreign sky, after a diving-and-swimming outing off Singapore, where he’d been due to sing for a North East India festival. Early reports called it a scuba incident; others said the artist had taken off his life jacket before a swim. Authorities continue to piece together the final minutes. That duality—tidal, unresolved—was how the news first arrived in India: an unthinkable “no” spoken in two languages at once.
GATE 7, PAST MIDNIGHT
The convoy moved out of Indira Gandhi International Airport just after midnight, slow as ritual, unhurried by sirens. On the perimeter road, motorists pulled aside as if choreographed by grief. By then, the announcement from Dispur had travelled faster than any escort: Assam would mourn for three days, a civic metronome set to a gentler tempo, flags lowered, festivities dimmed. It was the government’s way of making space for a state’s private sorrow.
The body was prepared for its onward journey. Schedules flickered—air slots, paperwork, the bureaucracy of bereavement. “Special flight” gave way to “first available,” the kind of logistical downgrade that aches only because it underlines a larger helplessness. Still, the plan held: Delhi to Guwahati at first light, then public homage. In Assam, that meant more than a ceremony. It meant an address where all could turn up and say the single, untranslatable word we use for goodbye when a voice has been the furniture of our lives. Deccan Herald+1
THE MAGICAL VOICE HAS FALLEN SILENT
Politicians of all stripes put down talking points and picked up the simplest vocabulary: shock, gratitude, and prayer. The Chief Minister’s message was spare—“tragic beyond words,” “a magical voice has fallen silent”—which is precisely how grief sounds before it grows punctuation. For once, no one tried to own the narrative; the state presence felt less like a podium and more like a pair of joined hands. In that posture, bureaucracy can be a balm. The Times of India
Back in Singapore, organizers and officials chalked out timelines. One account said he had suffered breathing difficulties after going under; CPR was attempted en route to Singapore General Hospital; the ICU could not reverse what the water had started. By evening, the details began to blur—the way facts do when they run faster than the heart can follow. In Guwahati, none of that changed what families were already doing: queuing playlists, ironing white gamochas, telling stories of the first time a radio made them stop mid-chore because a confident voice had turned a room into a theatre.
“Call him a playback singer and you capture only a sliver; he composed, wrote, and performed with the comfort of a man who knew he could carry a tune even when the world forgot its lines”
A STATE LOWERS ITS VOICE
State mourning is a protocol, yes, but in Assam, it is also an instrument you tune by ear. Colleges cued his songs in corridors without being told. Vendors put aside the morning quarrel about coriander and handed over a little extra with the change. Buses carried a run of “Ya Ali” that ought to have been annoying—but somehow wasn’t—because every second rider hummed along in their own register and the harmony worked despite itself. That was the obituary worth reading: a public that knew instinctively how to hold quiet together and then fill it with music.
Police advisories went out. So did crowd-control maps. A stadium was set up not for performance, but for reverence—gates numbered, water points marked, ambulances idling in the wings like ushers. Volunteers were told to mind older people at the barricades. “If they must sing,” one official briefing allegedly said, “let them sing softly.” Softness is a policy, too.
THE ACCIDENT EVERYONE TRIES TO EXPLAIN
Explanations are unhappy furniture. You need them, you lean on them, and they never fit the room. Was it scuba or a swim? A jacket on, then off? Warnings ignored or a misread current? One statement out of Assam was clear: the Chief Minister said the singer had gone swimming without a life jacket, and Singaporean authorities would question companions to establish the sequence. Elsewhere, festival statements and news reports used words like “breathing difficulties,” “complications,” and “ICU.” When you put them together, they form a sketch, but it doesn’t make sense.
Back in India, a different branch of government began speaking a language it knows: law and procedure. An inquiry was promised; first information reports were filed against the event organizer and the singer’s manager—allegations of negligence to be tested, not conclusions to be leapt to. The point, officials seemed to imply, was as much about the future as the past: if you can trace failure, you can build fences that keep the next artist safe. The Times of India
THE CITY THAT GREW UP ON HIS VOICE
Some artists enthrone themselves in a single genre, while others build a home with many doors. Zubeen was always walking through doorways. For Assam, he was the boy from Jorhat whose songs threaded adolescence to the first job, heartbreak to fireworks, bhogali bihu to city lights. For the rest of India, he was also the unexpected smoke and silver in a Hindi film chorus, the “Ya Ali” that travelled further than its own credits. His career never acted its age. It switched tongues without apology and wore rebellion with a smile.
Call him a playback singer and you capture only a sliver; he composed, wrote, and performed with the comfort of a man who knew he could carry a tune even when the world forgot its lines. He could inhabit a love song as easily as a protest refrain; he did not keep his registers in separate closets. That cross-country of sound is why people in belts far from the Brahmaputra—younger, algorithm-bred—felt the jolt when Delhi’s midnight turned into morning and said out loud that he was gone.
THE PROCESSION BEFORE THE PROCESSION
At Guwahati airport, the arrival was a geography lesson. The queue contained neighbourhoods: Maligaon and Moran, Beltola and Barpeta, Dispur and Dhekiajuli, Shillong cousins who’d caught the first bus, Delhi students who’d flown home not knowing whether they’d make it in time. Someone’s phone played a tinny refrain; someone else shushed them—and then, a moment later, sang along. Grief has poor acoustics and perfect pitch.
The first scuffle didn’t surprise anyone—any gathering this big invents its own elbow. Police widened a path and asked the back rows to imagine the view from a wheelchair. People did. A cyclist in a Messi jersey rode alongside the hearse for half a kilometre and then peeled away as if he’d been given his cue. A child waved; the mother lowered the small hand and then let it rise again because some gestures are for the child, not the child’s audience.
KEY FACTS, FOR READERS WHO NEED THE STRAIGHT LINES INSIDE THE ELEGY
- Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma received Zubeen Garg’s body in Delhi before the onward journey to Guwahati.
- Assam declared a three-day State mourning in the singer’s honour.
- Zubeen Garg died in Singapore following a diving/swimming incident ahead of a scheduled performance; details vary across reports as authorities investigate.
- The CM said the singer went swimming without a life jacket and that Singapore authorities would question companions to establish the sequence of events.
- FIRs have been filed in India against the event organizer and the singer’s manager; the state has promised a transparent inquiry.
The mortal remains reached Delhi overnight and were scheduled to arrive in Guwahati in the morning for public homage.
WHAT A GOVERNMENT CAN—AND CAN’T—DO
Governments are good at scaffolding. They are less good at the breeze. Here, the scaffolding mattered. Receiving the body in Delhi was not theatre; it was an acknowledgement on behalf of people who would have been there if physics allowed. Declaring three days of mourning was not a bureaucratic sigh; it was a schedule cleared so that a collective could gather itself. Promising an inquiry and lodging FIRs were not second acts; they were parallel tracks toward the same destination—making sure a public goodbye contains, folded inside it, a public responsibility.
But even the best-run protocol cannot tidy up a loss like this. On the third morning, flags will climb back to full mast. Files will begin their paper-cut progress through offices. School assemblies will return to arithmetic and announcements. The ache will linger, taking shortcuts through markets and ferry ghats. The administration can soften the road; it cannot shorten it.
A THOUSAND PRIVATE OBITUARIES
You could write a library of tributes and miss the one that matters: the taxi driver who kept a cassette so worn that the hiss became percussion; the tea-plucker who timed her day to a radio slot; the brother who once proposed, disastrously, by singing along to a track he had no business attempting—and who now stands in a crowd, remembering how she had laughed and said yes anyway. These are the unverifiable obituaries—the only kind that count.
Across the Northeast, night markets shortened their hours the way eyes close. In Delhi’s Assam Bhawan, a line moved slowly past a condolence register, each signature a handwriting class from a different district. In Singapore, a handful of diaspora kids, who knew the artist mainly through their parents’ nostalgia, showed up at the waterfront and played his music into the evening. The wind did what it does to small speakers; the river—this one named differently—answered with its own low chord.
THE HOUSE THAT SONGS BUILT
Legacy is a big word that hides in small ones. For a generation, Zubeen translated home into sound: xobdo to rhythm, rhythm to road. He made being regionally rooted feel like a feature, not a fence. He proved that the sky above a small-stage annual day could be the same size as the sky above a film set in Mumbai, and that a voice carrying over a field in Jorhat was as serious as a studio take. The house he built has a roof of many languages and a floor plan of many moods. It is still standing. The rooms are only louder now that he has stepped out.
THE LAST NOTE
The cortege reached the ground where the public would gather. The sound system did what sound systems do in large weather: misbehaved. Microphones popped; volunteers overcorrected; someone tripped over a cable and turned a table into kindling. And still, none of it felt like failure. The crowd adjusted its volume down, then up, the way water finds its level. At some point, these stories always refuse clocks—a thousand people arrived, unsignalled, at the same line of the same song. It wasn’t perfectly together; that was the point. Harmony is simply disagreement with good manners.
The formalities closed—prayers, a guard of honour, a moment of silence that was never entirely silent because a child somewhere always needs to ask a question at precisely the wrong time. Then the crowds began to move. A man in his sixties wiped his face with a handkerchief that had seen better days. A teenager recorded the retreating vehicle and didn’t post it. A constable hummed the chorus not quite under his breath. In the language of cities, that is how love writes itself on an ordinary afternoon.
WHAT REMAINS
There will be hearings, reports, and timelines that claim to arrange chaos into sequence. There will be op-eds that attempt to summarise the civilizational aspect. There will be a season, not far away, when election rallies try to borrow this hush and spend it on applause. And then, thankfully, there will be the long run of quieter things: the scooter that sounds like a backing track as it climbs Zoo Road; the ferry that keeps time as if taught by a metronome; the tea stall where a hook from a 2000s album arrives unannounced and the man with the ladle pauses mid-pour for half a beat before he finishes the glass. That is what a singer leaves: a way for a place to hear itself.
He stepped into the studio in 1992 and left the door forever ajar. Anamika was the name on the cassette, but the signature was his—quicksilver riffs, a young voice that could grin and ache in the same bar. From the breezy rush of “Maya” to the midnight bruise of “Mayabini Ratir Bukut,” the sound was unmistakably new. Overnight, buses, canteens, and narrow hostel corridors were humming along, and the nickname followed him like a headline: Assam’s heartthrob.
What came next was less a catalogue than a constellation. Zubeen sang in Assamese, Hindi, Bengali, and kept opening fresh windows—Bodo, Nepali, Tiwa, Karbi, even Bhojpuri and Tamil—as if languages were just different paths to the same stage. Mumbai’s film world heard him too; in 2006, “Ya Ali” threaded its way through the country like a rumour that turned true, and a national audience learned a voice Northeast listeners had long claimed as their own.
But the stage could never hold all of him. Long before the charts, the boy from Jorhat walked into B. Borooah College with a restless certainty that art had a job beyond applause. He talked about people the way some talk about melody—without calculation, as if kindness were a chorus everyone could sing. That instinct turned followers into a public and popularity into a kind of stewardship.
So when the time called, he didn’t lower his voice. In January 2019, as anger rose in Assam over the Citizenship Amendment Bill, he wrote an unblinking letter to then Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal—a plea and a warning in equal measure—asking him to stand with the state, promising to organize if he did not. By December, when protests filled the streets, he stepped off the dais and into the crowd, speaking not to fans but to neighbours.
Meanwhile, tonight, if you stand by the river in Guwahati, the current will sound like breath taken in before a first line. On the opposite bank, an auntie will be telling a story that involves a wedding, a microphone, and a boast that was never proven—“I once saw him touch a note no one else could reach.” The niece will laugh, the water will carry it, and the city will file this away, one more private footnote to a public life. The State mourning will end, as it must. The songs will not.
