Ai gets up to wash her hands. Anima guesses from the emphatic way in which she pushes her chair back that she wants no further questions on the subject. But the chair topples over and Ai's legs grow unsteady without support. Anima springs up to help her but stops.

Upstairs, Anima opens the steel cupboard and sits on the floor to look through its contents. There's dust on everything. Anna's spare pair of spectacles is covered with it. She picks them up and wipes the lenses with the end of her sari. She sees Anna's light-brown eyes in them. She remembers how they looked on the day he heard about Siddharth and rushed to Mumbai. Tears had solidified in them and over that glazed surface had flitted shadows of pain, helplessness, compassion. When he held her to his chest, she had heard a heart grown erratic. She had glanced at his face. His ruddy skin had gone pale. She had loosened the tight circle of his arms around her and sat him down in the settee. She had sat beside him, his head against her shoulder, stroking what was left of his wispy hair.

He must have begun to die inwardly after that. One day Anna had risen at dawn and disappeared. While Ai had gone into a shell, Bachchu Kaka, Ashesh and Anima had searched for him in the unlikeliest places, crazed by grief and bewilderment. A year, two years, then three years passed. In all that time, Ai had not said a word about his going. Initially, they thought she was in shock and didn’t pester her with questions. At last they gave up the search out of sheer exhaustion. But the hope of finding him some day would not die. Even now, their eyes flit through crowds automatically, looking for his familiar face. Even now, they scan news of men from nowhere doing good work in remote places, and, with deep dread, news of unidentified bodies found in wells and on railway tracks.

Seven years after a person is reported missing, the law declares him dead. (Why seven? Why not six? Or eight?) Legally Anna died after seven years. His property, shares, bank deposits which had always been Ai's, now went to her legally. Anna's will said they should. But that did not mean Anna was really dead. Anima has still not abandoned hope that he will reappear one day.