Every meeting with Udayan was a feast in more than one way: a feast for the palate, a feast for the mind, a feast for the eye, a feast of wit and humour. He could be trusted to rustle up exquisite dishes. The spread was eclectic. It included recipes from across India and indeed from across many parts of the world. He held forth on food - and indeed on books and art and politics -with an enthusiasm that never flagged.

You could count on him to give you - in between remarks on a work of Akbar Padamsee he had just acquired - clear instructions about how to make a sweet and chilli-hot Andhra chutney or a Bohri biryani or a Surati undiyo or a Gujarati kadhi or a Hyderabadi keema. I have tried these recipes often with a measure of success.

Once he spent a better part of an evening telling me how to prepare mutton sandwiches - the kind that he and I ate in our childhood.  I needed to use a Parsi vinegar, a particular kind of mustard paste (available in only one shop in Mumbai), a specific loaf of bread (from an Irani bakery) and so on. He then warned me that the sandwich might not be entirely to my satisfaction because the butter I needed to use had gone out of the market decades ago. This was Polson's butter. But he asked me - with his hall-mark wink of complicity - to be patient. He knew someone from the Polson family who had agreed to part with the recipe that had been a closely guarded trade secret.

That promise he wasn't able to fulfil.  Kya yaar, Udayan!

-Dileep Padgaokar