“The woman was: beautiful. Not the arranged beauty of a studio portrait — the dynamic beauty of a person caught mid-movement, mid-life, the beauty that came from: being rather than: posing. She wore one of the costumes from the trunk — the red choli, the gold dupatta — and she was: smiling. The smile of a person who was: performing, who was: alive in the way that performers were alive, which was: more than the rest of us, because they burned: brighter.”