Fifteen minutes of fame. That was last week's story. You met Sochi, Angelina Jolie's taxi driver while she filmed 'First they killed my father' in Cambodia. But long before Sochi, there was another taxi driver called Tarachand Saggar, another seeker after immortality. He rests in peace now, somewhere in Delhi, not immortal but not quite unknown either, but his story and mine have been interwoven since I was 22.

I first met him in Calcutta. I was a reporter in The Statesman's iconic youth magazine, JS, in charge of finding interesting snippets of real life for the inside cover. Word came to me that someone waiting in the lobby was claiming he could lift weights with his hair. Tarachand looked like some muscular creature from a Greek myth. The face had an Apollonian hauteur, and his forehead could have been a seer's, wide and horizonless. A man equal parts leprechaun, jester and gutter rat. From his temples two oily locks of curly hair hung down about six inches.