Hendrickson Affair

Another day, another call with Sodeep. With him, conversation never begins gently; it bursts in laughing, swearing, tumbling over itself. That familiar rhythm again — fucker, fuck — not as aggression, but as punctuation. Commas and full stops in his spoken language. A way of keeping things light, friendly, alive. His exuberance is almost suspicious in a world where so many around him seem weighed down.

He told me the whole day had been consumed by errands. Family matters. Both his sisters live in landed property now — secure, respectable, the visible markers of having “done well” in Singapore. Their sons, he said, studied well, even went to elite schools. A perfect script, the kind the nation loves to repeat. And then, almost casually, he added that both brothers-in-law suffer from depression.

Another depression case.

He said it without judgement, more with puzzlement. How could men who had followed the rules so carefully end up hollowed out inside? The contrast was striking. Here was Sodeep — financially battered, stitched up, drinking, laughing, swearing like punctuation — still exuberant, still giggling, still refusing to let gravity win. Around him, men who had accumulated all the right things were quietly unravelling. Singapore has always been good at producing outcomes. It has been less skilled at absorbing what those outcomes cost.

From there, the conversation drifted — inevitably — towards lawyers. Towards one in particular: a senior criminal defence advocate of the old school, known for capital cases, for the kind of work that leaves a residue you can’t wash off by simply going home. Like Sodeep, he came from Kerala — same coastal hardness, same quiet intelligence, same complicated intimacy with alcohol.

Sodeep spoke about him with a mixture of respect and familiarity. The man drank heavily, he said — not recklessly, but deliberately. He kept a cupboard of liquor at a private club, one of those discreet places where lawyers gather. Not bars in the ordinary sense, but rooms with carpets, low lighting, locked doors. These were not places for relaxation. They were places for meetings.

Private meetings. Sometimes secretive ones.

It was in this atmosphere — and sometimes in places like that — that Sodeep located what he called, without hesitation, the Hendrickson Affair.

He said it as though it were common vocabulary. And in a sense, it is: the Hendrickson Affair is not a rumour; it is a named episode in Singapore’s political memory, discussed publicly and recorded in official material, tied to the late 1980s, to U.S.–Singapore tensions, and to allegations of foreign interference in domestic politics.

Sodeep’s telling carried the texture of someone who remembers the era not as a textbook paragraph but as a lived climate — law as signal, diplomacy as pressure, and small-state vulnerability as a constant hum in the background. He spoke of lawyers, intermediaries, and men who understood that there are consequences you cannot always write down. He spoke of containment rather than spectacle. Of swift decisions rather than theatre.

What struck me was not his certainty, but his assumption that I would know.

In 1980's, I was in NUS. Studying. Reading. Designing. Living inside a university bubble where history felt conceptual rather than procedural. I knew about regional instability in lectures and articles. I knew the headlines of an anxious decade. But I was not in the rooms where decisions carried weight, nor near the informal ecosystems — professional, social, sometimes alcohol-soaked — where political temperature is felt before it is announced.

And the Hendrickson Affair itself belongs more precisely to the late 1980s, with the public rupture occurring in 1988 — a correction I had to make to my own internal timeline as I listened to him braid years together by mood, by pressure, by memory rather than by calendar.

In those years, the region was tense in different ways: the Philippines convulsing after Marcos, Malaysia tightening control, Southeast Asia repeatedly haunted by the fear that disorder spreads faster than reassurance. Singapore, disciplined and vigilant, treated credibility as survival. Law was never only law; it was also posture — not in the vain sense, but in the small-state sense: a way of signalling firmness to a watching world.

It was also a period when certain prominent legal figures became symbols in the public imagination — men whose careers brushed against the question of where law ends and politics begins, and what happens when a person steps into the wrong light at the wrong time. In such climates, the invisible hand is not a single hand. It is an entire field of forces — institutions, foreign interests, ambition, fear, pride — moving history as it is later narrated.

As the saying goes: winners write the chronicles. The defeated are written as cautionary tales.

Those club meetings, thick with smoke and alcohol in Sodeep’s telling, were part of that ecosystem — not conspiratorial in a cinematic sense, but deeply serious. Men who understood that in small states, mistakes echo loudly. That entanglements must be handled swiftly, quietly, decisively. Sodeep said, with a hint of pride, that Singapore managed such pressures with discipline. No chaos. No theatre. Just containment.

Perhaps that explains something essential.

Why the advocate drank the way he did. Why Sodeep laughs the way he does.

Carrying knowledge that cannot be shared openly — whether from courtrooms, capital cases, or the political weather around a country — leaves residue. Some people internalise it and collapse inward. Depression becomes the price of discipline. Others externalise it — through laughter, profanity, drink, motion — anything to stop pressure from calcifying inside.

Neither response is clean. Neither is noble. Neither is entirely wrong.

When the call ended, I found myself thinking less about the Hendrickson Affair as an “event” than as a demonstration of timing — how history arrives unevenly, how it reaches people at different depths. One person remembers studios and critiques; another remembers files, desks, and the hush of rooms where consequences are weighed before they are ever announced.

History does not arrive evenly. It reaches people at different depths.

Perhaps that is why Sodeep keeps laughing. Why his swearing functions like punctuation. He refuses to let pressure sediment inside. He lets it escape as sound, as drink, as irreverence.

And perhaps that, too, is a form of wisdom — not refined, not doctrinal, not teachable — but stubbornly human, forged in the quieter rooms where history once paused to decide what it would allow to happen next.