we’re broke as a bangladeshi in the days before his six months’ salary is finally paid. i have thirty MVR, deth even less. we’re at panini on chaandhanee magu, a kanmathee spot that serves its namesake. but i have ordered a sausage and deth a chicken bun.

deth is recently divorced but he is living the life, dating women left, right, and centre. i feel like he could thrive in prison because deth allows himself to accept whatever circumstances he finds himself in. it’s an almost monk like calm that he has, and at so young an age. enviable.

‘you say something?’ he asks.

‘nothing,’ i reply and go back to eating my sausage while deth inspects his chicken bun.

deth is an unusual character. i first met him five years ago while i was trying to sell something. we became friends. we would take ten rufiyaa coffees from a kada to raalhugandu and deth would sketch the bridge. he was always sketching, always drawing. those days, i never saw him without his sketchbook. he spoke little, laughed his little laugh, kshh kshh. an enigmatic man. we both read the same story once and he sent me the very sentence that resonated most with me. that’s how i knew he was, in some small but important sense, a kindred spirit.

in a world where most people cannot sit with themselves, deth is very refreshing. i heard from a friend that one day deth told him (my friend) that he was not going to think for three days. at the end of it, it seems deth thought deeply for some time and told my friend that all the thinking had made him famished.

‘you sure you didn’t say anything?’ deth asks.

i shake my head. i try to make some time every day for myself, without distractions. to sit quietly and see what comes up. and not be alarmed even if i think of setting fire to the permanent collection at the gallery. because a thought is different from an act. it might sound obvious, even trite, but among people i’ve met, there is often little distance between thought and act. i am guilty of this too. but i’ve been finding more space between the two.

which brings me to free will. a middle-aged man such as i will doubtlessly have some opinions regarding this old chestnut, and i do. i don’t think most of us are free. and the kind of freedom we have, in essence, is very restricted. when thoughts arise, and we have no control over that, we can choose, with enough practice, to go with them, or let to let them go. THAT, i think is at the crux of it, that is our freedom.

maybe.

‘freedom?’ says deth. ‘what about it?’

‘i like the sausage,’ i tell him. ‘really, i do.’

the world seems full of chronic overthinkers, of anxious people besieged, even crippled by their thoughts. but here’s young deth, at 23 divorced from the love of his life, yet strangely content, playing chess in his head. he asks for little, gives life his whole, and i really think i can learn a thing or two from him. maybe we all can. god bless deth.

‘you DID say something, didn’t you?’

‘nothing,’ i say. ‘just glad to have you, buddy.’