Wiki fiction stew/Exta Ghantesvara

Exta Ghantesvara is a semi-retired former photographer and, now, head curator of Canska castle, located on its dramatic perch above the Swift river in the foothills of the Shahdagh Mountains. In her youth, Exta attained a fair amount of recognition as a photographer, initially working for several newspapers, but then spending most of her career freelancing. As an independent and successful professional, she never took time for the task of creating a family.

Exta has always been outspoken and gregarious. She maintains contact with a large, if widely scattered, network of correspondents who have been her friends, business partners and subjects of photographic portrait sessions over the course of many decades. The assistant curators of Canska castle regard Curator Ghantesvara as something of an absentee administrator. Exta gives her assistant full administrative authority during her absences, which are frequent and often long. Not a few of the assistant curators would prefer that they be allowed to travel more, but Exta claims almost every travel opportunity (usually offers of donations to the Castle's collections) for herself. She has many friends and acquaintances who are eager to host her for a few days whenever she travels to a nearby destination.

Exta has always had a dark side, built up over time, starting from her earliest years and arising from self-doubts and a sense that she has never really found her true place in life. Her sense of alienation started with her failure to establish an empathic relationship with her own parents; she left home at the age of 16. Constantly plagued by strange compulsions and what nearly constitutes a chorus of inner voices, she is never comfortable having to stay in one place for more than just a few days. She still hopes, before she dies, to resolve her sense that some unseen mystery about her life remains to be revealed. Her hair is now transitioned from blond to gray, her long back is slightly bent contrary to the graceful arch it had in her youth and she wonders how many years of healthy late maturity remain.