It was my friend Prabhakar’s birthday on Thursday and I had rung him up early in the morning to wish him and to invite him to have lunch with me to celebrate. I tried both his landline and mobile phones without success and concluded that he must be out of town and left it at that. Late in the evening, I got a call from his son to say that Prabhakar had had a stroke and was unable to speak but could hear whatever I told him on the phone. I greeted Prabhakar and informed him that I would come over soon to visit with him and try to cheer him up.
I was able to only yesterday as I was tied up on Friday with some other work at home with air conditioning and electricians taking up quite a bit of my time and energies.
Since I had to go to an area quite close to where my favourite young friends G and K live, I called them up and suggested that we meet up for elevenses on Saturday and they agreed.
I spent a very pleasant morning with Prabhakar who I found was quite mobile and well on his way to recovery. We caught up with all that had happened to us since our last meeting a few months ago.
G and K picked me up from Prabhakar’s place to take me to a cafe close by. I was in for a surprise as K’s childhood friend Krishna was spending the week-end with them and he too joined us. I had never met Krishna but we had spoken to each other on the phone when he came to know that I had worked in a company where his late maternal uncle had worked. We had exchanged news about his uncle and me and promised to meet up the next time he visited Pune. That young man is a journalist with a magazine that I am very fond of and read and I was looking forward to meeting him and this surprise was a very welcome one.
The cafe, a new one for all of us was a very pleasant surprise and we indulged ourselves a bit more than we perhaps should have.
Krishna and I got talking about our mutual connections when it turned out that he had grown up with my nieces and nephews in Chennai and knew my brother, sister in law, and their immediate family, as had K who had never discussed his childhood with me. When Krishna expressed surprise that people who he knew so well were my brother and sister in law, he was zapped and said that he found it difficult to believe at which point of time I got my brother Arvind and sister in law Shanta on the phone and surprised them also with Krishna. I was in turn connected to the other contacts that Krishna was still in touch with and it was an amazing exercise all around.
So a series of events led me to meeting up with a distant relative as well as a friend of my family in Chennai. In the bargain, the relationship with the existing friends got strengthened a bit with connections going back to our mutual roots.
Whether Krishna, G and K will change my life or I theirs, remains to be seen but they have come in to my life with the promise of better relationships to evolve.
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