I know that it might be nice to have a smart catchy sentence to restart the blog after a year. But you know that I am no good at those. So let me get straight down to business.

Where was I all of last year? I wish I had an interesting story that accounts for my absence – an important assignment, a book perhaps or at least an abhimaan-style breakdown . But I have no such story.I just stopped writing one day and then It was too difficult to pick it up again. I had nothing to say, no opinions on anything.

There were those very tough six months after Munni went under a speeding SUV. That wasn’t entirely the driver’s fault. On June 11, 2011 She just decided to cross the road at 9 30 a.m when the traffic is insane on our road. The gardener left the gate open and mademoiselle decided to take a stroll and ended up under the SUV with an arm and a leg completely crushed. Several surgeries later she came home with chronic ulcers and a malfunctioning kidney and a hemoglobin level of 6. While sending her home with us the vet had said “ we have done all we could. Now it is all up to your love and care.” He did hint that there may be a possibility of having to amputate one or both the legs and if it came to the latter, we may have to take some tough decisions as she may not be able to manage on two legs only. Those of you who know Munni know that she is bad news and big trouble, very self-willed and totally disobedient. But she is a fighter. She decided to live despite all the odds and on Nov 1^st she decided she had enough of all the bandages and medication. I kept bandaging her legs and she kept taking them out So I decided to leave her be. And by Nov 15^th she was hobbling on 3 legs and by dec 15^th she was on all four. And now she is back to being the master of the house. The doctors at the hospital are so amazed that they want to present a paper on her. Zoozoo was initially traumatized but then she became our helper both for keeping a watch on Munni and keeping us cheerful with her monkey tricks. So all is well on that front now.

But that is no excuse for not writing here. In fact sharing it here might have been a source of comfort for me in those tough days. I guess I was plain lazy. Sometime in Jan 2011, I started working with a group of people running an internet magazine called Solvanam in Tamil . you can access my contributions here. I was exposed to some amazing writing in Tamil and many international writers, some of which I translated. This was one of the reasons that I felt I did not have anything good enough to publish. The bloggers I was reading regularly also wrote so wonderfully that I began to wonder what I was doing here. So I decided to slowly let this die and was pretty sure that no one was going to notice.

And then something happened. Many of my friends from blogdom wrote to ask when I was going to start. That’s when I realized that this blog was never about great prose or highly literary/ intellectual stuff. It was simply about sharing which is as important for me as it seems to be for those lovely people who have been encouraging me to come back via email , blog comments and on face book. So now is as good a time as any and since the blog posts have always been about nothing, what better way to start than with a nothing-post?

So ye all nice people, here I am back with my rambles and the simple stories from my unimportant life. But it is good to know that you will always be there for me as you have been in the past. So welcome back to my blog and let the bonding begin!

Love and hugs

Usha