Anima carries the notebooks to the centre of the room. The ceiling lamp sheds maximum light here. She fetches a cane waste-paper basket and sets it down beside the heap. She sits before it on the floor, cross-legged, a pair of scissors in her hand. She picks up the topmost notebook, the first in the series. Salman Khan smiles up at her from its cover. She resists the temptation of opening it. If she begins to read it, she is lost. She tears out a thin sheaf of pages from the notebook, shreds it into ribbons and stuffs them in the cane basket. As succeeding sheaves of paper enter the jaws of the scissors and are shredded, the tearing and shredding fall into a natural rhythm. She accompanies the rhythm silently with a childhood tongue-twister about the aunt who cuts up the uncle's work papers with a pair of scissors and stuffs them into a waste-paper basket. ‘Kakune Kakanche kamache kagad katrine kapun karandit komble.’ As a child she used to have a vivid mental picture of the aunt. She sat on the floor like Anima now, but fatly. Her eyebrows clashed above her nose and her hair was pulled to the top of her head in a Narad Muni knot. In Anima's imagination, the story continued beyond the rhyme with the aunt rising and dancing ferociously on the heap of shredded paper in the basket.

Anima's work picks up speed. She has shredded six notebooks. She fetches another basket from the bedroom and varies the beat of the aunt-and-uncle rhyme, so that sometimes the scissors snap together on the first beat and sometimes on the last. After the eighth diary, she brings out the bath bucket from the bathroom. Finally, the twelfth diary goes into the bucket, Shah Rukh Khan's dimpled smile and all.

For a few moments Anima sits exhausted, looking intently at the two baskets and the bath bucket filled with mountains of paper. She takes a tentative breath, allowing it to feel her insides as it comes up. Any regret? A faint twinge of pain? No? Nothing at all? Let's test this. Let me do the dangerous thing. She plunges her hand into a basket and pulls out some random pieces of paper. Each of the shreds carries just a few legible words. She reads them. One shakes her slightly. Anna. But even that name produces only a brief shooting pain. Siddharth's none at all. It's like muscles that die in a myocardial infarction. When the infarction happens, the whole chest cavity is a single epic pain. The muscles die. Medication will not bring them to life. But those that are still alive return to work. And soon it is as if the others never existed.

When Bachchu Kaka had his myocardial infarction, he almost died. With Anna's untiring nursing, he managed to hang on.