'Sarada! My dear Sarada!' she shouted and embraced her. The housewife felt like a person — totally parched and dried up, about to die of thirst — getting a drink of cool water from the new earthen kooja poured into her mouth with a spoon and given thus a new life. The friend did indeed give her a new life — 'You are Sarada. You came first in our school in the tenth class. You came first in the music competition conducted by the college. You used to paint good pictures too. We were ten friends altogether — I meet all of them some time or other. We write letters to each other. Only you have gone out of our reach! Tell me why are you living incognito?' her friend confronted her.

'Yes, Pramila — what you say is true. Of course I'm Sarada — until you said it I could not remember it — all the shelves of my mind were taken up with only one thing — how well I can scrub the floors. I remembered nothing else. Had I not met you, I would have gone mad,' said the housewife named Sarada.

Sarada returned home, climbed the attic and fished out her certificates, the pictures she had drawn — old albums, everything she succeeded in getting out. She also searched further and managed to find the prizes she had received in school and college.

Overjoyed, she returned home.

'You have not been here — look at the state of the house — it's like a choultry. Oh what a relief you are here, now it is like a festival for us,' said Sarada's husband.