Anima checks herself. Over the years she has grown sceptical about this thing called memory. Does she really remember the change of seasons or has she merely picked up what older people say? Memory's a damned dangerous thing. Who knows what part is imagination and what part fact in the things we recall. A novelist imagines people and events but memories of personal experience colour what she creates. And how reliable is that? Our recall of the past is neither coherent nor complete. We are aware that we have an incomplete story. But we must tell a complete one. So we fill in imagined details. Unconsciously, of course. But even if we did it consciously, we would refuse to admit it. Listeners must believe it's the truth, whatever that is.

When Ai talks about Anna, she claims her memories are exactly the way things happened. But Anima listens to them as stories. In the last ten years, her stories have changed. For a long time the details remained constant while the tone of the telling changed, changing meaning. Now the details too are changing.

It has been different with Anima. She has frozen every detail of Siddharth's being in her memory. But she can no longer have a conversation with him. His killing killed the values for which they had lived. Their shared life ended abruptly. The world in which she had to piece her life together again was not the world he knew. The walls of their home are a different colour now. There is a different cover on their bed. New cotton has been stuffed into their mattress, filling out the familiar hollow of his body on his side. It has been painful not to continue living in the world he knew. Yet she needs Siddharth's memory, even in its frozen state, to accompany her through the rest of her life.

Ai too is destined to have Anna with her till the end of her life. So she has had to create an image of him that she can live with. She began by gradually erasing the memories that were too burdensome to carry. It is now her story, shorn of everyone else's. She is the chief protagonist, the heroine—a tragic heroine as it happens. She compares herself to Kasturba. She, Sindhu Joshi, too has had to endure a lifetime of neglect like Mother Kastur.