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When she all but forgot about Ashok, he returned with loads of money and an ambition to make a mountain of wealth out of it, but it didn’t take her long to realize that he was into smuggling and that he returned only to head his gang’s operations in the country. While she was ill at ease with his escapades, Ashok was restive at Dilip’s presence in his house. Dilip too resented Ashok’s return as that reduced him as a mere servant of the house though Mithya allowed him to reign in her bed. But matters came to a head after they shifted into the newly acquired bungalow at 9, Castle Hills, when Ashok wanted her to fire Dilip and she insisted that he be allowed to stay put in their A.C. Guards house.
While Ashok decided to bide for time, Dilip, seeing the writing on the wall, played up her man’s neglect of her, and made her believe that there was an other woman in his life, out to take her position. Soon, he contrived to convince her that Ashok entertained the idea of arranging a suparito eliminate her and played upon her weakness for him by hammering that if she were killed, he would be left high and dry. Goaded by Dilip to act before it was too late, she pondered over the ways and means to eliminate her man and get away with it as well. By way of distraction, so it seemed to her, she came to know of her father’s death, well after the obsequies were over. Though her family had disowned her for her amoral liaisons, she had informed her parents about her change of address to 9, Castle Hills, just in case.
In that poignant meeting between the mother and her daughter, after a decade long separation, being at a loss for words, they lost eyes to each other. When the mother opened her arms in reconciliation, the daughter closed hers for a hug of self-solace. Amidst their myriad emotions in their prolonged embrace, as the ethos of motherhood came to the fore, the mother savored her daughter while the daughter thought of her own daughter. As the spasms of her daughter’s heart conveyed her resurgent craving for her child, the mother, in that moment of self-fulfillment, felt that her daughter too should experience the same. Even as the daughter’s craving to hug her own daughter had increased, the mother turned skeptical about the chances of finding the girl sixteen years after she had abandoned her there. Whatever, as the mother wanted to take her to the orphanage, the daughter felt it would be wiser for her mother to first trace her girl, and then prepare her before she herself took her under her wings.