It is all baby Samyukta’s fault.

Cuddling and cooing with her was my main occupation in the six months I was with her, and I developed an inertia and indifference towards everything else. We returned two months ago, leaving her, and I found that the inertia persisted. I looked at my blog post and found my last posting was in October last year.

Not that anyone cares, I think, least of all me. And I had almost decided to stop blogging once and for all, like I did once before. But something happened which revealed that blogging, apart from a good exercise on the keyboard for arthritic fingers, and pandering to my own vanity, has a genuine worth.

A couple of weeks ago my chat box on g mail popped out to show a guest on line – the chat box when accessed through the blog does not reveal the identity of the guest, but just cryptically says ‘guest’, with the dire warning “You are talking to an unidentified person, be careful what you say” or some thing very like it. I almost feel that it is like “Big Brother is watching”. The guest said “I was born in the house you lived in.” And I was nonplussed. To my knowledge the only person who was born in this house in Chennai where I live is my niece Swati, and she and I are well aware of that fact. At a loss, I decided to prod, and got some extremely interesting and satisfying answers.

The guest, Tara, was born when her parents had lived in the same house that we had in Pondicherry. (See above). Her father had been my father’s immediate predecessor in the same government post, and so had lived there. Tara said she had seen my post on Pondicherry and had been quite excited. Though she did not remember much of her Pondicherry days, she said, her older sister Hema did, and her memories were quite like my own, including our school days. She asked for my phone number, and told me that Hema, who lived in the US, would contact me in ten minutes .

And she did. We spoke for a long while. I could sense the excitement in her as she remembered her time in Pondicherry and I was happy to share the memories of our school and friends there. There is nothing quite like going back to a shared childhood, even if, as in this case, the days did not coincide. We talked about the house, and its live-in ghost, which fortunately neither of us had seen. And how we found the house and its surroundings so changed from the time we lived there. When I told my mother about this chat, she clearly remembered the family.

And so after fifty years, and thousands of miles apart, a little blog post brought together two total strangers with a bit of common history.

And that makes it all worthwhile.

To quote the Terminator, I will be back!