Jaya's cousin

Quite a few years when I had first sent in my story, Jaya, to chowk, I got an email from her cousin. Even though I had fictionalized the story quite a bit and had not used her last name, Jaya's cousin recognized her name. She was a scientist at CERN in Switzerland. We kept in touch for a while. Then we lost touch. I hate the fact that I don't even remember her name. Pratibha? Pratima? Last name? How elusive, this brain of mine. It can remember strange details (how a certain piece of rock looked exactly at some Circuit House when I was 8, the name of some little girl I sat next to in a bus years ago) but her name eludes me.

I was thinking of Jaya today...and then I thought of her cousin. On a related note, a few years ago I found a link to this old story of mine on some site in Germany (the rest of it is in German) and now I work for a German company. I am wandering.

So, here's a teaser from the story:

I was born at the darkest moment of the night. The time before the night lightens for the first glimmerings of dawn.
The time that is totally still, waiting...always. And now I drift here, in this darkness. A darkness that makes the hour of my birth seem like day. So thick, so impenetrable, so comfortable. Effortlessly, I turn in this womb of
death and I am happy. Happy? Just a word that I always wanted to really understand for so long. A goal never attained.

If you want to read more:

Here's a link to the German site: http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~bunk/mirror/jaya.htm

And here's the link to the slightly more edited version on chowk: http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00000492&channel=gulberg

Is most of life about losing touch with people: through death and drifting? Or is it something we do...connecting with others in between the death and the drifting?