Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in another context, my friend Karl reminded me about the nastiness that implied and the overall scheme of things in today’s world.
I immediately responded to him that I had not forgotten and also explained to him why I had not forgotten.
A lady friend of mine was born exactly on that day. As I write this, she is exactly 70 years and one day old. One of the gentlest persons that I have ever come across and a grandmother nonpareil.
For obvious reasons, I can’t out her identity but you will know why I write about her in a while.
I knew this lady before she was married. She was my then fiance’s classmate and friend in the early sixties of the last century. Fate however meant that we kept bumping into each other in many places including much later in Delhi in the early eighties. It was then that I got to meet her husband who in a moment of indiscretion called her Hero in my presence.
On being corrected by me that surely it should be heroine, he came out with the story about her birthday coinciding with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how she was first called an Atom Bomb for being a stunner and then on her birthday being found out being called Hiroshima, shortened to Hero!