The rock guitarist whose killing shocked India's north-east

When Chongtham Vikram Singh finally came home to India's north-eastern state of Manipur, his old friend Dhiren Sadokpam went to the airport to receive him.

It was not the homecoming he had imagined. Vikram arrived in the cargo hold, inside a steel container.

Three days earlier, the 54-year-old musician had been beaten to death outside his home in south-east Delhi.

"Nobody seemed to have the strength to speak," Sadokpam told the BBC. "What could be said?"

Vikram had spent much of his life travelling with his guitars, carrying his music from small stages in Manipur's capital, Imphal, to jazz clubs, classrooms and concert halls in Delhi.

According to police and his family, he had gone downstairs late on Sunday night after a group of men were shouting and drinking outside his apartment building. When he objected to the disturbance, the men allegedly attacked him.

His wife, Joshna Chongtham, said Vikram returned upstairs but was pursued and assaulted outside the family's apartment.

Hours later, after complaining of breathlessness, he was taken to hospital by his 20-year-old son. He died there early in the morning.

Seven men and a juvenile have been arrested in connection with his killing. Police say they are investigating the circumstances of the attack.

The death has prompted an outpouring of grief and anger, and renewed concerns about the discrimination faced by people from India's north-east in Delhi, where members of the community have for years reported racial abuse, harassment and violence.

Police say they have so far found no evidence of a racial motive. But north-eastern groups have held protests and demanded an impartial investigation.

The case has also drawn attention to Vikram himself - a familiar figure in Manipur's music scene who, over four decades of playing and teaching, gathered around him a large circle of students, friends and admirers.

At a press conference two days after his death, his wife Joshna said: "We are not seeking revenge. We are seeking justice. He had a name, a family and a life that mattered."

For most of his 54 years, that life had revolved around music.

Vikram grew up around it. His mother, Chongtham Kamala, was a celebrated singer who lent her voice to Matamgi Manipur, the first feature film made in the Manipuri language.

As a boy, he accompanied her to All India Radio for recordings. Before long, he had auditioned there himself and become a child artist, playing the accordion.

There is an old black-and-white photograph of Vikram from those years. He is kneeling stiffly in front of a microphone with an accordion balanced across his lap. Beside him, another boy sits behind a pair of drums. Both wear the grave expressions of children who have been told that a photograph is being taken.

The boy with the accordion would soon discover guitars - first Hawaiian and Spanish, then electric - and, somewhere along the way, acquire thick black glasses and a splendid moustache.

By the mid-1980s, Imphal had become an unlikely outpost of rock music. The sound travelled there largely on cassette tapes, bringing with it the hard rock and heavy metal being played thousands of miles away.

Young men formed bands and crowded into local halls, working with whatever they could find - modest sound systems, locally made amplifiers, guitars turned up as loud as they would go. They listened, copied, experimented.

Vikram was studying at Don Bosco School then and still playing accordion and Hawaiian guitar. Years later, he remembered how he and his friends would ask the priests for permission to leave school to watch a local band perform.

"Those were sweet and innocent days that actually inspired me to go for rock," he recalled in a 2014 interview.

Soon, watching was no longer enough. Vikram took up the electric guitar and began playing in bands himself - first Ultra Vires, then Phoenix and Eastern Dark - becoming part of the generation that was giving Imphal's new rock scene a sound of its own.

It was around this time, in 1987, that Dhiren Sadokpam first met him.

They were setting off from Imphal to study in Shillong, and Sadokpam remembers them waiting at a temporary interstate bus terminal with backpacks, steel luggage boxes and bedding for the long journey.

Vikram was boyish and energetic, he recalls, but mostly kept to himself.

"He would spend long hours in his room, mastering each and every composition that came his way," Sadokpam said.

With each band, Vikram's playing evolved. Ultra Vires became a place to experiment. Phoenix, which would become one of the defining bands of Manipur's early rock scene, brought greater precision and a devoted following that endured long after its heyday.

By the time he joined Eastern Dark, Sadokpam remembers the quiet young man disappearing into the instrument, making its six strings "cry and sing".

In the early 1990s, he spent two years in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he encountered musicians at the Calcutta School of Music, a century-old institution with a strong tradition of Western classical music, and was drawn more deeply into jazz and classical music. His own playing began to range across styles, from rock and blues to jazz and fusion.

By the 2000s, Vikram had moved to Delhi, where he built a life around performing and teaching music.

In 2010, he reconnected with an old musician friend and formed Fubar Ghetto. The band played jazz, blues, rock and fusion, with improvisation at the centre of it. Their first performance was a charity concert near the Yamuna river.

From there, they worked their way through Delhi's live-music circuit: universities, clubs and cultural festivals, the National School of Drama and, on one occasion, the Czech Embassy.

Vikram never became a major star. Instead, he built the quieter reputation of a working musician - among the people he played with, the students he taught and the musicians he helped along the way.

Since his killing, many of those people have remembered the man who was gentle, generous and largely uninterested in recognition.

Former student guitarist Sachidananda Angom remembered him as "always kind, helpful" and someone who "could really light up a room".

Mame Khan, the Rajasthani folk singer with whom Vikram performed for several years, told The Indian Express that Vikram was "a really kind and lovely person" who never picked arguments with anyone.

Sadokpam is careful not to make more of their friendship than it was.

They had met as young men in 1987, lost touch for two decades and found each other again in middle age. In between, Sadokpam followed Vikram's musical life from a distance, as a fan and a friend.

They last met in Delhi in 2019, when Vikram invited him home for dinner.

"Vikram picked up his guitar and played and spoke excitedly about his students," he recalled.

When it was time to leave, Vikram asked him to come again soon. Sadokpam said he promised he would.

"I never made it back."