More barbs from the mirror: have you forgotten that you have eaten the salt of that house?
She is overcome. Salt? My very life is forfeit to that house.
Then admit it—you have betrayed your trust. When you heard the news; when that letter arrived—they must have waited for you.
The mirror would not be gainsaid.
A Parsi lawyer, his wife, & son living in Pakistan shelter a young Muslim woman from India who, due to family circumstances, finds herself homeless at their doorstep around the time of Partition. Of gratuitous kindness in the midst of despair, the obligations of friendship fulfilled, of the bonds we choose to forge sometimes being stronger than those thrust on us by birth, and of the wreckage time leaves in its wake. "...speech after all was a medium of exchange between strangers, not friends. Solitary, each inexorable step taking her further down Time's rapacious maw."