Sodeep

  

When I met Sodeep again, the sensation that washed over me was oddly familiar — as if time had folded in on itself and placed us back into one of those afternoons at Chinatown, when I still kept a studio there. I remember watching him from a distance in those days: the way he would sneak across from the Subordinate Courts, slip into Block 23, and retrieve his whisky from an old cupboard like a monk tending to a secret altar. He would take a quiet drink, settle himself, and let the world’s weight soften into an afternoon nap.

He reminded me then — and still does — of the drunken swordsman in old tales, or the Tang poet who believed clarity arrived only after the world began to blur. There was always something romantic, even mythical, in the way he approached life: half in rebellion, half in surrender, always moving between pleasure and philosophy as though they were two doors opening into the same room.

Years passed — years in which both of us walked our separate paths, mine through design, fashion, photography, cities, and personal transformations; his through the unpredictable territories of work, wandering, and the long companionship of whisky. And today, at Thomson Plaza, we met again — older, softened, yet still carrying the echoes of who we once were.

We sat at the NTUC bar, a strange new hybrid space where groceries meet conviviality, where families walk by as strangers sip beer beside a waterfall wall. It was in that unceremonious corner of the world that two old souls found themselves discussing the most ancient things.

Sodeep began with the ash — the grey, sacred dust that Hindus press onto their foreheads. Vibhuti. I’ve always known of the ritual, but today he revealed its deeper pulse:

We wear ash because that is what we return to.
We carry ash to remember our humility.
The body is borrowed.
Life is brief.
All identities are temporary disguises.

It struck me as he spoke that this simple act, this mark on the forehead, is a more profound philosophy than many books. Ash is the final truth that remains after fire burns through illusion. It whispers to us: Let the ego fall. Walk lightly. Everything you are, you will one day release.

From that point, our conversation slid effortlessly into the Bhagavad Gita. Not the Gita people quote to sound wise, but the deeper current beneath it — the one you only feel when life has scalded and softened you.

Sodeep spoke of the true meaning of existence:
that we are not the doers;
that the world happens through us,
not because of us;
that we are witnesses passing through a theatre of dissolving forms.

And somehow, from the Gita, we drifted into the legend of Jesus in the Himalayas — the thirteen hidden years where he is said to have walked among yogis, mystics, and seekers. The historicity of it is hardly the point. What matters is the symbolism:
that truth likes to wander,
that wisdom crosses borders long before we draw them,
that all seekers drink from the same silent spring.

As he spoke, I watched the shimmering water wall behind us — its flowing, melting reflections — and I felt as though it were quietly illustrating our conversation. Life appears solid, yet dissolves the moment you try to hold it. People return after years. Old friendships reignite. New wisdom emerges from the mouths of those you once thought you fully understood.

And so we sat there — two men, both aging, both carrying our private histories, reunited not just by chance but by the mysterious rhythm of life itself.

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THE CONTINUATION

The conversation deepened in a way that only happens when the past is no longer a burden, and the present feels light enough to be honest.

Sodeep lifted his glass the way a philosopher lifts a metaphor — not to escape life, but to acknowledge its strange beauty. He told me that London had been his playground, his classroom, his awakening. Seven free years. A law degree from the College of London, his call to the Bar. But what he cherished most were not the accolades — it was the people, the women, the reckless joy of living without fear. Those memories still glowed in him, like embers he cannot let go of.

He confessed, half-laughing, half-resigned, that quitting liquor is difficult. But he also said something that lingered with me long after:

"There is a truth in intoxication, you know. Not the alcohol — but the shedding of pretence. Sometimes the world is too loud, and a drink makes it soft enough for the soul to speak."

I understood him. We all have our ways of softening the world — some through meditation, some through art, some through silence, others through burnished amber in a glass.

As we spoke, I felt that our meeting was not just a reunion but a gentle reminder of the impermanence of all things. The ash he spoke of, the Gita’s teachings, the wandering legends of Jesus — they all pointed to the same realisation:

Everything returns to the vastness.
Friendships, too — disappearing and returning like waves.
Lives crossing, parting, and meeting again when the time is ripe.

And perhaps that is why today felt special. Not dramatic, not loud — simply sacred in its ordinariness. A moment where philosophy, memory, and companionship sat together at a plastic NTUC table, and nothing more was required.

As the evening deepened, our conversation drifted into the kind of terrain that only old friends dare to enter — the invisible injuries that age has uncovered, the ghosts that return after decades to claim their due.

I noticed the slight limp in Sodeep's walk. Years ago, he would stride with a kind of buoyant swagger — the confidence of youth, of London nights, of a man who felt the world would make room for him. But now the old injury from his younger days has returned, echoing through his bones with the quiet insistence of time. Age is not merely a number; it is a ledger, and the body eventually comes collecting. He laughed it off in his usual nonchalant way, yet beneath that laugh I sensed the familiar truth:

that the body remembers what the mind tries to forget.

Still, even limping, he carries himself with a kind of dignity that does not come from pride but from acceptance. He is not fighting time; he is walking alongside it, leaning on its shoulder like an old companion.

Our talk then turned to his father — a man he clearly admired, perhaps more deeply than he has ever fully expressed. His father had served as a chief clerk in the British administration, a position that carried respect, stability, and the quiet authority of a man who understood order in a world constantly shifting. Because of that service, he received a pension all the way until he died at the astonishing age of 92 — a longevity that seemed to cast a quiet blessing over the family.

But what struck me most was the story Sodeep shared about his father during the Japanese occupation. There had been a moment — impulsive, reckless, unimaginable today — when his father struck one of the local leaders appointed during that time. No reason, no hesitation. A blow delivered not out of politics, but out of some fierce, unspoken conviction within him.

Sodeep smiled when he told me this, a smile shaped by pride and disbelief.
"You couldn’t do that today," he said.
And he was right — today’s leaders sit behind protocols, security, layers of ritualized distance. The world has become too polite, too bureaucratic, too well-insulated for spontaneous acts of raw human defiance. But his father had lived in a different moral landscape — one where a man’s instincts still mattered, where courage and foolishness often walked hand in hand.

That story illuminated something in Sodeep: a lineage of men who are both gentle and unpredictable, humble yet capable of sudden flame. It explained, in a way, his own contradictions — the philosopher who likes whisky, the lawyer who drifts like a wandering poet, the man who laughs loudly but carries quiet wounds.

And then, softly, he mentioned his wife.
She had wanted to divorce him once — perhaps more than once — but somehow never followed through. Life has a way of entangling people even as it tries to separate them. Their marriage is not a romantic ideal, not a fairy tale, not the glossy picture couples chase today. It is something older, more textured — a long dance of affection, disappointment, duty, fatigue, and a strange kind of loyalty that neither of them knows how to fully name.

Perhaps she stayed out of habit.
Perhaps out of love.
Perhaps out of resignation.
Perhaps because she too understood that, beneath all the frictions, there is still a thread — fragile, thin, yet unbroken.

As Sodeep spoke, I saw not the caricature of a man who drinks, limps, remembers London, and argues with his wife — but a human being shaped by gravity and grace. A man trying, like all of us, to live within the complicated architecture of his own history.

And in that moment — with the water wall shimmering behind us, the taste of salt and whisky in the air, and the chatter of strangers passing through their own small universes — I felt something quiet and profound:

That every life, no matter how chaotic or imperfect, is a scripture.
And some scriptures are written not in ink, but in scars, memories, and the strange endurance of the human spirit.

When Sodeep spoke of London in the early nineties, I realised he had lived there at a hinge-point of history, when the old world had not yet finished dissolving and the new one had not quite learned its manners. Europe was vibrating then—politically, culturally, spiritually—as though the continent itself had been released from a long-held breath.

The Berlin Wall had come down in November 1989. Not slowly, not ceremonially, but almost accidentally—confused guards, crowds with hammers, history undone by ordinary people who had simply decided they would no longer wait. By the time Sodeep arrived in London, that wall was already rubble, sold in souvenir shops, its fragments scattered like relics of a defeated god. And only two years later, in December 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved—quietly, bureaucratically—into fifteen independent nations. An empire ended not with fire, but with paperwork.

Those years were strange that way. The world did not explode; it unfastened.

London in the early 90s was electric. It was still gritty, still cheap enough for students and wanderers, still thick with cigarette smoke and philosophical arguments conducted over pints. Europe had opened. Borders softened. Trains, ferries, and ideas moved freely. For a young man with curiosity, appetite, and a law degree in progress, the continent was no longer a map—it was a playground.

Sodeep told me how he would cross from London to France just to buy cheaper wine. I remember pausing at that—forty-five minutes by sea? Surely an exaggeration. But no. It was entirely possible then. The Dover–Calais crossing by hovercraft could take as little as thirty-five to forty-five minutes in the late 80s and early 90s. The hovercraft skimmed the water like an impatient thought, loud, futuristic, slightly absurd. One could leave England after breakfast and be drinking French wine before lunch, returning the same day as if borders were merely suggestions.

That was the tempo of the time. Fast. Light. Slightly reckless.

And so were the lives lived within it.

When Sodeep counted his escapades—four thousand women—he did so not as a confession, but as a provocation. I did not interrogate the number; numbers in such stories are never arithmetic. Born in 1964, he would have been in his late twenties in those years—prime time for velocity. Is four thousand literally possible? Perhaps not, if measured with a clerk’s pen. But symbolically, the number makes sense. It speaks not of bodies, but of abundance, appetite, and a man who lived as though the world might close again at any moment.

And perhaps that instinct was not wrong. After all, Europe had just watched empires vanish.

He spoke of bizarre encounters—one in particular lodged itself into my memory. A woman from Cyprus appearing at his bunk while he lay feverish, bringing water, sitting astride him, rocking life back into him before disappearing as suddenly as she had arrived. When I asked him, half-amused, half-medical, whether that helped reduce his temperature, he laughed and said no—definitely not. But that was never the point. These stories were not about cure; they were about interruption. Life barging in, uninvited, unplanned.

He traced part of this openness to his lineage from Kerala. That made me pause. Kerala—India’s coastal outlier—has always been different. Older, softer, more porous. Long before Goa became shorthand for freedom, Kerala had already been trading with the world—Arabs, Chinese, Europeans—by sea. Christianity arrived there early. Communism took root without bloodshed. Literacy flourished. And yes, Russian women did come—especially later, as tourists and travellers—but even earlier there was a cultural ease, a gentler Hinduism, less punitive, more conversational.

It startled me, because my own first encounter with India had been Madras—now Chennai—with Regu. My memory of that trip was one of strictness, of rules felt before they were explained, of Hinduism as structure rather than invitation. Kerala, by contrast, seemed to belong to another India entirely. And I wondered, fleetingly, whether Shashi—whom I once knew—came from there too. It would have made sense.

Sodeep laughed as he spoke of all this. Laughed too when he spoke of bankruptcy. Millions reduced to subsistence after the legal system stripped it all away. A moment of softness—becoming guarantor for a three-million-dollar loan when his boss was already drowning in debt—had sealed it. The firm collapsed further. He was left standing in the ruins.

Yet he spoke of it without bitterness.

“That is life,” he said, and he meant it—not as resignation, but as recognition. Up and down. Surprise after surprise. He did not romanticise the fall, nor did he disown the joy that came before it. Meaning, for him, had not vanished with money. It had condensed.

That afternoon, meaning looked like this:
Johnny Walker Gold Reserve on the table outside NTUC, where every product in the store could be ordered and served like a communal pantry of modern life. Chicken wings, fries, barbecued pork and lamb, toast from Wang’s, finished with mochi. A man wandering past raised his glass and joined us for a sip. A woman walked by and gave us a thumbs-up, as if to say: yes—this is it.

And Sodeep laughed. Not politely. Not cautiously. But with a whole-hearted, lifting laughter that made the air lighter around it. The kind of laughter that survives bankruptcy, injury, age, and the long accounting of one’s own life.

As I sat there with him, I understood something quietly and completely:

Some men measure life by accumulation.
Others by ascension.
But a few—rare, stubborn souls—measure it by intensity and openness.

Sodeep belongs to the last kind.

History collapsed around him. Empires fell. Borders dissolved. Fortunes rose and vanished. Bodies aged. Legs limped. Yet he remained intact in one essential way: he continued to meet life without armour.

And perhaps that is why his laughter still carries—
because it has already passed through fire,
and returned, like ash,
light enough to be worn on the forehead.