for she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through — the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,

I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen.

She felt as if she were seventeen again, ignorant, fearful, a creature all gusty emotions and pain. (eight: HOW SHALL I ADDRESS YOU?)

Girls who survive trauma do wear a certain vulnerability around them, but this kind of vulnerability is from where their greatest strength stems.

She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.

"Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?"

She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important — you know

She's so young and so impressionable. There's an innocence and a vulnerability that you almost can't really manufacture. It's like a look in the eye that a young girl has that a 23-year-old doesn't.

My pain? This was the pain of an Indian girl. These girls were mostly from Delhi and a few from Bangalore and Mumbai. Normally, the story of an Indian girl’s pain comes from the victims, survivors, or the feminists. A regular girl's suffering in her day-to-day life doesn’t ever feature in the national feminist narrative. They have been conditioned to accept it as part of living, as an everyday struggle. A part of the culture that wants to crush their dreams. Their aspirations. Their confidence.

She was like that, excited and delighted by little things, crossing her fingers before any remotely unpredictable event, like tasting a new flavor of ice cream, or dropping a letter in a mailbox. It was a quality he did not understand. It made him feel stupid, as if the world contained hidden wonders he could not anticipate, or see. He looked at her face, which, it occurred to him, had not grown out of its girlhood, the eyes untroubled, the pleasing features unfirm, as if they still had to settle into some sort of permanent expression. Nicknamed after a nursery rhyme, she had yet to shed a childhood endearment.

She had grown through loss and confusion into a girl who lived almost entirely inside her head, taking refuge in the places she created there, not so much repulsed by others’ reality as unable to perceive it.

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots.

This is the girl, here, this girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love.

She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old.