“I don’t have to go far to see everything. I does see how your father does watch you. His eyes just like my father’s own. … You do for yourself better than me!” (p 184)

These words from Mala are the culmination of her madness and her sanity, embodying her paradoxical dissociation from her past and showing several of the book’s themes at once. When she says she can see everything Mala is referring to her memory of the events that have so shaped her life that she has been living out again in her mind, but this time from a different perspective. The key to understanding Mala’s madness is the realization here that she knows she has changed but not that the world has as well. To her, Pohpoh’s father is still alive and Ambrose still the young man that she mistook Otoh for, and Pohpoh still the young girl whose father watches her in the worst ways. But Mala is just sane enough to know that she is not a young girl anymore, so therefore she must be Mala instead, and she chooses to try to fix the wounds of the past by protecting Pohpoh the way no one protected her in her childhood.

Despite the misery and madness prevalent through the earlier books, it is the promise of beauty and healing with which the book ends, and it happens because of what Mala does here. She finally lets go of Pohpoh, sending the girl off to the skies of Paradise (pun intended) to do and be better. She allows her world to finally change instead of retreating further into her memories and living entirely in an unaltered world of her youth. It is because of this that she can finally begin healing, and hopefully awaiting a letter from Asha.