When Noon Became Music: Remembering Fawzia (Effie) Rahman, the Voice That Taught Assam How to Listen

Some voices arrive loudly. They announce themselves, demand attention, and fade when the noise ends. Others come softly, without ceremony, and stay not as sound, but as atmosphere. Fawzia Rahman’s voice belonged to the second kind. It did not perform. It did not compete. It did not rush. It simply entered our lives and rearranged them quietly, teaching us, without instruction, how to listen.

For many of us growing up in Assam, she was not a broadcaster first. She was present. Noon did not begin with the clock. It began when her programme Lunch Time Melodies drifted into our homes through All India Radio, Dibrugarh. Kitchens paused. Lunch plates waited. Offices softened. Rooms leaned inward toward the radio, as though listening were a collective act. And then came her voice, composed, warm, unmistakably hers, steady as sunlight on a still river.

I did not know her name at first. I did not know what a “radio jockey” was. I did not know that I was listening to a pioneer. I only knew that when she spoke, something in the room settled. Her English did not intimidate. It did not instruct. It accompanied. It felt less like language and more like music itself, measured, melodic, and strangely intimate. Long before I could identify Simon & Garfunkel or Leonard Cohen, before I understood Nashville or New York, I understood her tone. And through that tone, I learned how to feel songs before I learned how to understand them.

In those years, English music did not circulate freely. There were no playlists, no algorithms, no YouTube trails leading from one song to another. Cassettes were rare. Records were very rare. The radio was the world. And through Fawzia Rahman, that world expanded quietly, without spectacle, without marketing. Nat King Cole arrived at noon in Assam. The Carpenters folded their harmonies into our afternoons. Bob Dylan, Smokie and Leonard Cohen wandered into rooms that had never heard their names spoken aloud. And yet nothing felt foreign. Nothing felt elite. Nothing felt out of place. Because her voice made everything feel local.

Listeners called her Effie. The name felt right, affectionate, intimate, easy. It carried none of the distance that often accompanies authority. She did not sound like someone broadcasting from elsewhere. She sounded like someone belonging to our days, our kitchens, our silences. Across homes, hostels, hospital wards, tea shops, and lonely rooms, her voice travelled unseen, unclaimed, but deeply felt. She belonged to people who never met her and loved her anyway.

Only much later did I learn what we had been listening to. That she was a staff artist-cum-programme executive of All India Radio, Dibrugarh. Her Western music programmes aired from the 1970s to the 1990s and quietly reshaped listening cultures across Assam. That she was, in fact, Assam’s first radio jockey long before the term “RJ” entered our vocabulary, long before FM radio made broadcasting theatrical and personality-driven. At a time when English radio voices were largely metropolitan and distant, here was a woman in Dibrugarh speaking English with grace, warmth, and confidence without pretence, without performance, without apology. That mattered more than we understood then.

Her English did not erase her location. It carried it. Her voice did not make Assam feel smaller. It made the world feel closer. She showed us, without ever saying so, that sophistication does not require displacement, and that global sound does not demand local silence. That you could belong fully to this place and still open windows to distant voices. That Assam could speak English to the world without losing its own accent of dignity.

Today, sound competes aggressively for attention. Voices rush. Songs are skipped halfway. Silence feels awkward. But in her presence, silence felt meaningful. It felt like part of the music. She taught us without instruction that listening is not consumption. It is attention. It is patience. It is care. It is an ethical act.

And she taught this without ever naming it.

She had studied at Pine Mount School and St. Mary’s School in Shillong, institutions known for refinement and academic excellence. Her education showed not as display, but as composure. Her polish never announced itself. It simply existed in her diction, her cadence, her emotional restraint. There was no effort to impress. Only a steady effort to serve the listener and honour the song. Her authority came not from volume but from trust.

Beyond radio, she carried the same quiet artistry into other parts of life. She was known as a gifted baker producing cakes and pastries that were almost unheard of in places like Dibrugarh in those days. Not as a profession, but as passion. Her cakes appeared at elite parties and private gatherings, crafted with the same care she brought to her broadcasts. There is something deeply fitting about that, a woman who fed people sweetness, both through sound and through sugar, both through voice and through oven warmth. In both spaces, she created comfort without spectacle.

Her signature programme, Lunch Time Melodies, did something rare: it made noon lyrical. It slowed the middle of the day. It softened the hours usually associated with rush, routine, and fatigue. She carved a listening sanctuary in the heart of working time a reminder that even in productivity, there is room for tenderness. For many, lunch did not feel complete without her voice. Food tasted gentler. Time moved kinder.

Her programmes transcended age, language, and social boundaries. Children listened. Elders listened. Office workers, homemakers, students, and hospital patients all found themselves inside the same soundscape. In a region marked by linguistic plurality and cultural diversity, her voice became a shared experience. She was not simply admired. She was trusted. Musicians respected her. Broadcasting professionals looked up to her. Listeners loved her not loudly, but faithfully.

Only later did I understand how quietly revolutionary her presence was. She was a woman speaking English on Assamese radio not from a metropolitan centre but from Dibrugarh in decades when broadcasting spaces were still deeply hierarchical and gendered. She did not announce a change. She embodied it. She did not make statements about representation. She simply showed up every day and spoke beautifully. That, too, is a form of courage.

Many who entered radio in Assam later, especially women, did so knowing that someone like her had already made that space possible. She did not build a legacy by branding. She built it by consistency every day, without spectacle.

Her personal life, too, carried quiet strength. She was married to the late Dr Alfred Rahman, former Vice Principal of Assam Medical College, Dibrugarh. She lost her eldest son, Arfin Rahman, 5 years back, a grief no parent should endure. She is survived by her younger daughter, Fariyal Rahman, and daughter-in-law, Zeenat. Yet none of this sorrow ever entered her voice. On air, she remained steady, composed, generous, offering comfort without ever naming pain. Perhaps that, too, is why her voice felt safe.

Years later, when FM radio rose and radio jockeys became celebrities, when broadcasting turned performance-driven and personality-centric, I often found myself comparing them unfairly, perhaps to her. Something felt missing. When news of her passing arrived, it felt strangely intimate as if someone from my childhood home had left. Someone who had been present during moments I had forgotten, shaping moods I had not noticed, influencing feelings I had not yet named. It felt like losing a voice that had accompanied growing up, not in conversation, but in atmosphere. Only then did I fully understand what her work had done.

She had not merely played Western music. She had taught a region how to listen to it. She had taught us that songs deserve patience. Those voices deserve respect. That silence deserves space. That sound deserves dignity. That listening itself is a moral practice, a way of being with others without interruption. She had not merely broadcast. She had cultivated attention.

She breathed her last on 16 January 2026, and her last rites will be held in Dibrugarh, the town from which her voice travelled so far and so faithfully. But her true resting place is elsewhere: in memory, in habit, in the emotional muscle memory of listeners who still hear her introductions before certain songs begin. Today, when I hear old English ballads, especially soft folk melodies or quiet love songs,  she was Assam’s first radio jockey. But more than that, she was our first listening teacher.

Her radio may have fallen silent. The frequencies may have moved on. The equipment may have changed. But her music has not. It waits between notes, between memories, between songs. And in that waiting, her voice continues to live.

Because some voices do not disappear when the broadcast ends. They migrate into memory, into mood, into how we hear the world. And once a voice teaches you how to listen, you never stop hearing it.

The writer teaches media studies at EFLU, Shillong Campus

Also Read: When the World Knocked Twice: Vengaboys, Post Malone, and the Changing Emotional Weather of Assam