‘Once she is settled then I can also rest,’ Meena sighed. Meena was still attractive. She had blossomed in widowhood. She had always looked after herself carefully, nourishing herself with milk and eggs, her skin smooth and soft with rich emollient creams. She was soft and plump and gleaming like the burnished pearl that nestled in the blue velveteen folds of her jewel box. For the moment she showed no signs of ageing or of any great decrepitude. She was a carefully preserved woman in her fifties but still looked youthful in her elegant sarees with their pastel shades, her traditional jewellery, her soignée air and softly parting lips which revealed pearly teeth when she smiled. Her husband had been rather a loadstone in his lifetime—talented in his own right, with a gift for writing on a variety of subjects in a somewhat journalistic style of prose, he was also a skilled pathologist. His little addictions grew as he mingled with friends and acquaintances. Ultimately his world and his life crumbled and he became the victim of the political upheaval in the country, forced to join the dreary convoy of refugees back to the Eastern Province from where he and his wife originally came, and then through boredom, through human weakness, through loss and despair, as if impelled by the deepest death wish, forgetful of his wife and child, drank himself to death—the death which was his only escape.