When she looks into the mirror she sees her mother. She peers close and observes that a grey hair streaks across the dull brown hair. She dolefully observes that she is greying at the same place that her mother greyed. Buy her mother greyed after she crossed fifty, and the black lustrous hair was so thick that it could not be enclosed in the palm. Her own hair is thinning near the forehead  - though just forty she feels fifty. Her complexion has attained placid wheat brown as against her mother’s glorious golden colour; her features once sharp are smudged by the onset of middle age. The melancholy dip of her eyes while in deep thought is from her mother.
 
She stands at the mirror in the bathroom to catch the glimpse of her mother and hold her there. She has not let her mother go, her mother has so insidiously settled in her memory and the subconscious that she never got up in the mornings alone. Her mother woke up with her and she experienced the gentle breath and warmth of her mother when she cradled herself in the large rocking chair to read a book. Now her double - her mother - has moved to the apparent level. She sees her double, her mother, in the contours of her face and in every curve of her body.
 
So much has her mother coalesced with her that she does not see where one ends and the other begins. She closes her eyes and the wooden door of her mother’s parental home opens in her mind. She lives her mother’s life; her mind maps the landscape of her mother’s childhood in Mylapore.