The generator coughed twice, then the strings of bulbs blinked on and the night market woke like a single creature. Rosa pushed her cart between the stalls, past sizzling satay and towers of mangoes, to the corner she had rented with the last of her savings.

Her first customer was a man in a paint-spattered shirt who studied her dumplings with narrowed eyes. "One serve," he said, as though placing a bet he expected to lose. Rosa's hands shook as she lifted the bamboo steamer.

The man took one bite, then another. He did not smile. He simply held up four fingers, and when the dumplings came he ate them standing there, watching the steam curl into the dark. "My mother made these," he said at last. "Same pleat, same ginger. I have not tasted them in thirty years." He paid, and then he did something better than smiling: he waved over three friends from the next stall.

By closing time the steamer was empty, and Rosa counted out coins under the tired bulbs. It was not a fortune. It was a beginning.