tableau

Each society spends months producing an effigy - or tableau - which are paraded through the streets and then burned at the bonfire sites.

Close by, another puja creates a tableau of the bereaved family, the mother sitting on the bed, the father at a sewing machine, their daughter’s picture in doctor’s scrubs on the wall.

For the viewer, that guesswork is eliminated by the macabre tableau to which she’s referring.

It was a tableau of a distinctly modern American family: mixed race, interfaith and blended, a mosaic of national origins, cultures and values.

The contrast with Harris, who bounded onstage afterward to embrace Biden and join him in the traditional arms-raised tableau, couldn’t have been more stark.