My sister in law Sudhira died last Sunday in a hospital in Chicago. She had been in hospital on a support system since the 18th of December. I was kept abreast of her hospitalisation and death by her daughter Nina and other relatives in India who too were getting bulletins.
I had known Sudhira longer than I had known my late wife. Sudhira married my then best friend Kittu in 1961. I was present at the birth of Nina and Nina was the first infant that I ever carried in my arms.
Kittu and Sudhira were also my great support system during my bachelor days at Hyderabad and naturally, all my friends knew them as well. Among them was a group of four sisters who were all part of my life then and about who I shall write another post some other time. Without me being aware of it, Sudhira had been in touch with two of them all these years though I lost touch with all the sisters from around 1964 when I had shifted to Madras now known as Chennai.
One of the sisters, now living in Canada had come to know of Sudhira’s death early yesterday morning and had rung up one of the sisters in India to pass on my phone number obtained from Nina with a request to call me and tell me about Sudhira’s death. So that sister Theresa, rang me up from Kerala and spoke to me after almost half a century and we caught up with all the news about our marriages, children, grand children, careers, etc and also about the where and what-abouts of our respective family members.
For me it was like a flash-back in cinemas taking me back to my youth and a time vastly different to what it is now. It took me the whole day yesterday to recover from that surprise reconnection.
The death of a loved one and modern communication devices put two old friends back in touch with each other after half a century!
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