The Death of a Guitarist

It’s late Sunday night, and for most working people, it is a time when the spectre of Monday looms large. It arises in the form of that tiny knot in the stomach that comes from the anticipation of having to negotiate the daily absurdities and aggressions of a city like Delhi. For Chongtham Vikram Singh, a guitarist from Manipur who had made Delhi his home nearly two decades ago, Monday came early last Sunday night, and in a far more dreaded form. It came not as the traffic, noise and petty negotiations of the morning to come but as the noise already gathering outside his home. He went downstairs to ask a group of men making a disturbance to keep it down. They chased him back into the corridor of his apartment, where they allegedly assaulted him so brutally that he died a few hours later in a hospital.

Seven men have been arrested and a juvenile apprehended. The police will conduct its investigation, and the courts will finally decide on conviction and punishment. But, as a society, who will tell us what has happened to a city in which simply asking someone to lower the noise can put a life in jeopardy? It is worrying that we have reached a stage where we may seek comfort in believing that this is merely another murder in a city. But those who have lived long enough in Delhi know the city produces the conditions in which eight people can turn a disagreement over noise into a collective beating.

Why? The answer is that we have allowed noise to become the new social power. We are now part of an increasingly aggressive public culture where the volume of the loudspeaker determines who is boss. It is this craving for entitlement that makes sure a wedding party must drown out the neighbourhood. We are at a stage where asking the DJ at a banquet hall to lower the volume at midnight becomes an arbitrary suggestion that may cost us our life. It is this unchecked noise that has turned into a declaration of sovereignty. It says: I am here, and you will hear me whether you like it or not.

That is what makes Singh’s death particularly disturbing. The kind of quarrel that led to it should have been unremarkable in a city. It should have been just a question of someone making too much noise and someone else asking them to stop. But it became sinister; it became sinister in precisely the way the writer Elias Canetti describes in his work on crowds and power. The individual, normally separated from others by all kinds of physical and psychological boundaries, suddenly finds himself among people who seem to be moving with the same impulse. The crowd offers a feeling of emboldenment and synchronises the impulse. It is this sameness of impulse that turned Singh into an enemy instead of a neighbour with an ordinary complaint.

The question then ceased to be whether the men were loud; it became an affront to their imagined sovereignty to do anything they liked. The mob does not always build up; sometimes it is simply a few people standing together outside an apartment building.

Psychoanalyst Siamak Movahedi speaks of times when something that appears to be noise should be understood as a message. The distinction between noise and message, he says, depends at least in part on the relationship between the people producing and receiving it. Perhaps that is what Singh was resisting that Sunday night: this idea that the men outside his home were entitled to disturb the peace of his family.

There is another dimension to the story that cannot simply be put aside. Singh’s death also brings, once again, to light the experience of people from the Northeast who often feel discriminated against and regarded as outsiders in the national capital. It has led to terrible crimes against them, like the one at Lajpat Nagar in 2014, when a young man from Arunachal Pradesh was beaten to death, and in 2010, when a young BPO employee was gangraped.

Would the assaulters have behaved like this with someone who looked like a ‘local’? We must think about this; we must think about what incidents like this do to the psyche of young people from the Northeast who, like most of us, also come to Delhi in pursuit of a better life. Singh was one of them. It was through his music that he had made a place for himself, building a life here. And in one moment, that life was ended.

What does an incident like this do to our behaviour? We stop complaining; we retreat and close our windows. We avoid confrontation, asking our children not to react when someone approaches them aggressively, but to just say sorry and move on. The civil space then gets occupied by those who have no such inhibitions.

That is the larger tragedy of the guitarist’s death. Among other things, a city is also an agreement between strangers. It is a covenant that enough room be left for others to lead their lives and that their boundaries be respected. We share the city’s resources, we form queues, we keep the volume down after a certain hour. Disagreements might occur, but civility demands that we sort them out in an amicable fashion. A city that cannot remain a shared space cannot be called a city anymore.

Let us think again about Singh and his family. He was inside his house; not seeking a confrontation. Asking for something as ordinary as lowering the volume should not have required courage. After all, what was Singh asking for? He was asking that he and his family be allowed to sleep. The men outside felt so secure in their belief that nobody—especially someone like Singh—had the right to question them that they came after him with such brute force.

Somewhere between Singh’s civil demand and their response, the fragile agreement of cohabitation was broken. Singh paid for it with his life. Civilised cities do not endure this. That we do makes the place we live in no longer a city.