In the evening we went to her room to take her to be cremated. All over the verandah and in her room, right up to where she lay dead, thousands of sparrows sat scattered on the floor. There was no chirruping. My mother broke some bread into little crumbs and threw it to them, the way my grandmother used to. The sparrows took no notice of the bread. When we carried my grandmother's corpse off, they flew away quietly. Taken as a whole, this passage emphasises: