Zubeen Garg: The Storm that Sang Us Awake

There are voices that do not merely sing, they dissolve time. Zubeen’s was such a voice, a rare and unrepeatable timbre that could not be taught, only gifted. It felt less like a sound and more like a climate, a weather of its own, filling the air with its changing moods. He could begin in a whisper that carried the intimacy of a lullaby and, within moments, break into a roar that rattled your bones. 

There was rebellion and tenderness braided together in every note. It was music that reached not only your ears but your marrow. Listening to Zubeen was to enter another dimension, to experience what Eliot meant when he wrote: *You are the music while the music lasts. With Zubeen, the music always lasted. It still does and will stay on forever and ever.

I remember the nights at NK Production studio on Zoo Road, those fevered hours when the world outside slept, but Zubeen was alive with his craft. Ten songs, sometimes fifteen especially during Bihu, would emerge from a single sitting. Each one different, yet each carrying his unmistakable soul. He did not ration his gift; he poured it out, as though he feared the universe might stop him if he paused. 

One night, watching him record song after song without fatigue, I wrote in *The Sentinel* a deliberately provocative piece calling him a “musical prostitute.” It was not insult but admiration, for his generosity to music, for the way he gave himself endlessly, dangerously, to every rhythm that beckoned him. 

Zubeen, instantly embraced it. He laughed, he celebrated it, and on more than one public occasion, he declared it his favorite article ever written about him in english. That was the man. Where others bristled at labels, he broke them open, wore them with pride, and turned them into truth. He returned from Bombay when he was at his peak for the love of his home state Assam.

Moreover, working with him on films  gave me another glimpse of his untamed spirit. He was relentless. His body bore bruises, his schedule was inhuman, yet he moved with an urgency that was almost divine. Most would have given up, citing fatigue or practicality. But Zubeen would not. He lived in the storm because he was the storm. After one such sleepless shoot, he turned to me, eyes blazing, and said, “D’com, life is not meant to be rehearsed. You just play it, again and again, until it makes sense.” That sentence has stayed with me. It was not philosophy for him, it was blood, it was breath.

We had our wild nights too, the ones that became legend among our friends. Long tables with bottles that emptied themselves as though conspiring with us, laughter that refused to stay indoors, and songs that never needed microphones. Pabitra Margherita was often with us, our trio of voices clashing and merging, from Bhupen Hazarika to Sting, from politics to theatre, from the future of Assam to the mysteries of the Brahmaputra. I drank recklessly in those days, until the pandemic brought me face to face with my own demons and I sought rehab. Yet through it all, Zubeen never once judged me. He was simply there, storming forward, carrying me along, reminding me that no fall was final if music still lived in your bones.

And then there was the Nehru Stadium concert for NE TV. I was anchoring with MTV’s Ruby Bhatia, and the place was an ocean of restless humanity. The air itself seemed too small to hold the anticipation. When Zubeen walked onto the stage, the crowd erupted, not with applause, but with something primal, tidal, uncontrollable. Ruby leaned towards me, her eyes wide, and whispered, “This is not a concert. This is a revolution.” She was right. I had anchored countless cultural events across Assam in those years, but that night was different. It was as if the entire state stood up at once and declared itself awake. The lights, the voices, the electricity, yet at the center of it all was one man with a voice, one storm of a voice that bound us all.

And still, beneath the thunder, there was always tenderness. I remember once on a drive back from a rehearsal, he braked suddenly and jumped out to lift a dog hit by another car. He cradled it, tears in his eyes, refusing to move until it was safe. Another time, I saw him pause a recording session because he noticed a junior technician was unwell. He arranged food, medicine, and stayed with the boy until he smiled again. For Zubeen, empathy was not a slogan. It was instinct, as natural as singing.

His song *Amanisha* haunts me now. “We are awake.” That was his call, his philosophy. Awake to joy, awake to pain, awake to the urgency of living fully, dangerously, without compromise. Today, as Assam prepares to carry him to his final resting place, a ten-bigha site at Kamarkuchi , Hatimura near Sonapur on September 23,  I cannot stop asking: how do you still thunder and  lightning? Perhaps the Brahmaputra will rise quietly when his body passes. Perhaps the trees will bow. Perhaps no sign will come at all. Yet in every heart that has ever trembled at his music, the storm will remain. 

Zubeen cannot end. He cannot be contained by earth or ash. Storms do not die; they change form. They become rivers, they become skies, they become the voices of those who dare to create without fear. He will live in every Assamese child who hums a tune, in every artist who refuses compromise, in every quiet act of compassion that goes unseen. He will live in the restless energy of a state that refuses to sleep. 

The last time I looked into his eyes, there was no hint of rest. Only fire. That is how I will remember him. As the storm who carried rebellion and tenderness together, as the brother who showed me that life is not rehearsed but lived raw, as the thunder that shook us all awake. And so, Zubeen, though grief has made us raw, though we are thunderstruck into silence, you are not gone. You are the voice, you are the storm, you are forever "Amanisha."

“In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.”
 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to a Skylark

You were our skylark, our storm, our unbodied joy whose race has not ended but only begun anew - in the skies of music, in the veins of Assam, in the restless hearts of all who dare to sing and create…