Memories?

 

Nothing but Memories, Nothing Even of That

Today I called Sodeep.
Another story. He never ceases to amaze me.

He laughed immediately and asked, almost theatrically, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
Of course—both.

He told me he has had a good six days since the New Year. I suspected the main companion of that goodness even before he said it: alcohol. New Year’s Eve, he said, was the best night of his life. Four friends. All born in 1964—January, March, September, September again, and December—now sixty-two years old, still swinging. Fourteen bottles. A 25-year Chivas. Thirty-five thousand spent on one great night, paid by two remisiers who decided that money, that night, should turn into sound, sweat, and memory.

The place was the Powerhouse.

Powerhouse is not merely a club. For an older generation, it is a time capsule. Born of Clarke Quay’s revival in the 1990s, Powerhouse carried an industrial, muscular energy—cavernous interiors, bodies packed close, music loud enough to erase self-consciousness. It belonged to a time before phones filmed everything, before nightlife became content. You went there to disappear, not to document.

For those born in the early 1960s—children of post-independence Singapore—Powerhouse represents a rare permission slip. This was the generation raised on discipline, scarcity, conformity, and long hours. To dance at sixty-two in a room now filled with the young is not nostalgia; it is defiance. It says: the body ages, but desire does not apologise.

Which generation goes there now? Mostly the young—twenties, thirties—who experience Powerhouse as spectacle, as ritual, as weekend release. For them, sixty-two-year-olds on stage are either amusing or invisible. But for the men dancing, it meant reclaiming time.

They danced on the stage. Music loud enough to dissolve gravity. When the DJ waved and beckoned them higher, they flew—or believed they could. Sodeep had already drunk two bottles by then. Everything tumbled.

He laughed as he told me how he landed face-first. Then his voice shifted. He said he hated blood. There was a lot of it. His face was bloody—jets pouring out. They used paper serviettes to stop it. The smell was bad. Metallic, unmistakable. He hated that part.

The ambulance took forty-five minutes to arrive.

His friends were injured too—spine, shoulders, knees. One is still in hospital today, six days later. Not a gentle opening to the year. And yet Sodeep was still giggling, the way he always does, as if laughter were his way of telling fate that it had not won.

Then he said something that made me pause—and smile.

Looking at his plastered face, he joked, “Now no one will say my face is radiant.”
We laughed. He said the plaster solves an old problem.

And then he told me a story from 1997.

In 1997, he had just gotten married. He was thirty-four—already late, by some measures. They were on a cruise at Darling Harbour.

Darling Harbour then was buoyant, optimistic, freshly polished by Australia’s 1990s confidence. Neon reflections on water. Restaurants buzzing. Night cruises drifting past skyline lights. Sydney before global fatigue, before security anxieties hardened public spaces. It felt open, celebratory—like a city that believed the future was generous.

On that cruise, two serious-looking gentlemen approached Sodeep. They asked to see his photographs. After a brief look, they invited him for a screen test. They were from ABC.

I told him his wife must have been exhilarated.
“No,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she wasn’t invited.”

That was the end of that conversation. The bluntness of it made us laugh all over again.

He said he later regretted the missed opportunity—joking that he could have become the next Hugh Grant. Picked up by ABC. A radiant face leading to a different life.

And now, with his face plastered, stitched, swollen, he said the problem of radiance has been solved at last. No casting agents. No misunderstandings. Just bandages and laughter.

“I came with nothing,” he said again. “I will leave with nothing—only memories.”
He said this is Buddha’s teaching.

That stopped me—again.

Nothing but memories?
I thought everything returns to nothing. Not even memory survives.

The Buddha never taught us to keep memories. He taught us to see them clearly and let them pass. Memory belongs to conditioned existence—samsara. It arises, lingers, dissolves. In higher states of being, memory still functions, but it no longer binds. One remembers without being imprisoned by remembering. Presence is not overwritten by the past.

So Sodeep is half-right, half-poet. We do not leave with memories—but while we still cling to being someone, memory is what we think we have.

He sent me a photo. Bandage on his forehead. Stitches above the eyes, to be removed tomorrow. I wondered what his daughter thought. He kept quiet. Some silences protect more than words ever could.

In an hour, he said, he would meet another friend—for a drink. He asked when we would meet again. I suggested vegetarian food, a walk, photography. He said sure. Then paused and asked, “Where are the watering holes along the walk?”

I said, “We shall see.”

And I wondered—quietly—whether he would ever escape the drink.
Or whether escape is even the right word.

Some men do not escape their fate.
They inhabit it.

The thought returned me to Gu Long—who lived fast, wrote sparely, and drank himself toward the edge. Gu Long’s heroes were drunks, gamblers, lonely swordsmen who understood that honour is fragile and life absurd. He drank not to forget life, but because he saw it too clearly. His death—complications from alcoholism—was not an accident, but a consistent conclusion to a chosen intensity.

A romantic death? Perhaps.
More accurately: a coherent life.

The Buddha would answer Gu Long gently—and perhaps Sodeep too:

Burning brightly is still burning.
Freedom is not found in intensity,
nor in suppression,
but in non-attachment.

And here I stand, between them.

I do not wish for excess.
I do not wish for heroic endings.

I am content with walking, photographing, eating simply, watching traces rather than flames.

Yet I understand why Powerhouse mattered that night. Why sixty-two-year-olds danced until gravity reminded them of time. Why Darling Harbour once shimmered with possibility. Why a radiant face could invite a screen test—and why a plastered face can now laugh at the irony.

Some men leave behind books.
Some leave behind silence.
Some leave behind memory.

And some—through scars, laughter, missed chances, and a stubborn refusal to behave as age demands—leave behind a question that keeps walking beside us long after the music stops.