When Zubeen Garg passed away earlier this month in Singapore at just 52, Assam did not merely lose a singer; it lost a questioner. His voice was less about delivering certainties than about unsettling us with doubts, pushing us to confront the fragile truths of love, loss, freedom, and belonging. In a world that craves tidy answers, Zubeen insisted on leaving space for the unfinished, the unresolved, the beautifully uncomfortable.

For many of us, Zubeen wasn’t simply someone we listened to; he was someone we argued with, someone who unsettled us with questions about what it means to live, to belong, and to struggle.

 My first real encounter with Zubeen wasn’t on a cassette player or television, but on a rain-soaked evening in Guwahati when I was about eight or nine years old.

 A neighborhood tea stall had a battered speaker playing Xixhu on repeat. I stood there, clutching a small cup of tea far too hot for my little hands, watching the rain trickle down the tin roof while his voice spilled out into the street. It wasn’t polished pop. It was raw, drenched with longing, full of contradictions. I didn’t fully understand the lyrics then, but something about the restlessness in his singing etched itself into me. That evening, the rain and his song fused in memory. For me and countless others, Zubeen became a companion in uncertainty.

Zubeen’s genius was that he could take the most local of images – a boat on the Brahmaputra, a bird in flight, a lover’s absence – and turn them into meditations on freedom, mortality, and the impossibility of holding on to what matters. He gave Assam not just melodies but metaphors.

Unlike many folk musicians who simply preserve tradition, Zubeen disturbed it. He forced us to think of tradition in motion – bending, reshaping, colliding with global influences. He could be singing a devotional tune one evening, a rock ballad the next, and a Bollywood playback the morning after. But beneath the variety was a single consistent pursuit: a refusal to give easy answers.

 I remember a concert where the crowd was roaring for encores, lost in the euphoria of his hits. Zubeen suddenly stopped midway and spoke about the plight of tea garden workers, their endless hours of labour for meagre pay. “What is the worth of our celebration,” he asked, “if those who built this land with their hands cannot celebrate with us?” The stadium, moments earlier electric with cheers, fell into an uneasy silence. For a brief instant, the stage was not about music but about truth-telling. That was Zubeen at his best: never just entertaining, always awakening.

 The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote that what we do in life is never really finished — our actions ripple outward, carried forward by others in ways we can’t predict. Zubeen’s absence feels exactly like that. His death has not diminished his presence; it has amplified it. You hear his voice spilling out of buses, from café speakers, in the headphones of students walking to tuition classes. You hear conversations about him in markets, on social media, in living rooms.

 Zubeen’s ghost isn’t haunting; it’s generative. It keeps us asking: How do we hold on to who we are without getting trapped in who we were? How do we embrace the modern without forgetting the riverbanks we grew up on?

 Perhaps Zubeen Garg’s greatest contribution was his courage to remain unfinished. He didn’t package his art with conclusions. Instead, he left trails of questions for us to pursue. How do we live authentically in a world of pretence? Can music heal when politics divides? What remains of us when the song ends?

 In asking these, he gifted Assam not a frozen memory but a living inheritance. Bhupen Hazarika gave us the voice of the Brahmaputra, eternal and grounded. Zubeen gave us the turbulence of its waves – restless, questioning, never still.

 Zubeen Garg is gone. But the questions remain. And in those questions, so does he.