The days when George Fernandes was fancied a favourite of the AIADMK chief, who could save the key compact of the Vajpayee-led coalition, led inexorably to the day she demanded his sack as a national security threat. Her allies in Tamil Nadu, who used to throng the residence of the country's most photographed portals in the hope of persuading Jayalalitha not to endanger their hard-earned crumbs of power, too, had another think coming.

There were others of belied hopes like Buta Singh as well. None of all this, alas, has deterred the latest of hopefuls from what is determined to prove itself the premier national party onceagain by a tie-up with a leader of rare record as a regional tyrant. Sharad Pawar may have come here and gone out of the Congress. His place in the electoral parleys with the former Chief Minister has soon been taken up by a rather un-Pawar-like pair.

Manmohan Singh, initiator of economic reforms, has been chosen to negotiate with a `neta' of economy-size cutouts; and A. K. Antony, of an erstwhile saintly image, to propitiate a politician crusading with even greater vigour against corruption charges in courts than for an array of causes ranging from Cauvery and territorial integrity to the truth about the total value of her footwear collection.

During the last Lok Sabha polls, this would have appeared a least likely scenario to unfold in less than a year and a half. The emissaries to Poes Garden are from another equally famous and commando-infested residence in far-away New Delhi. Between 10 Janpath and its Chennai counterpart, there then seemed to be as little of love lost as between the houses offeuding warlords. Jayalalitha raised the `foreign' issue long before Pawar dared to, and she did so in characteristically more strident terms.

It, however, took no more than a tea party to settle the question of the `national dignity' of `900 million Indians'. To someone who once feigned outrage at the idea, Sonia Gandhi was suddenly the country's obvious saviour, as soon as she accepted the axiom Satyameva Jayalalitha.

But, much water has flowed down the Cauvery and the Ganga since those turbulent days. None other than the presiding deity of Poes Garden herself had likened the tete-a-tete at the tea party to `a political earthquake'. The talks in Chennai are unlikely to cause more than a mild tremor. One reason is that the seismic convulsion that was claimed to have taken place in the Capital proved to be no great shakes, after all. It all ended without Gandhi forming a government and Jayalalitha returning home empty-handed.

Besides, there is no sign that the Jayalalitha-Congress alliance is going torun a smoother course than the AIADMK-BJP affair. Meanwhile, those who enter the Poes Garden precincts may soon be too wise by experience to need that dire warning.