Nightmares of the night and day when they had fled their home drove her from sleep. They were nightmares of screaming, torch-bearing, angry mobs chasing them, of being separated from her family, falling, houses burning. She never woke her husband, never shared her terror, but lay there, her heart racing, drenched in perspiration, taking deep breaths to quiet and comfort herself. Then anger would come—at her father. He hadn’t dispatched her sisters and their husbands to England.

And in the daytime, sitting alone, her thoughts had been haunted by the memory of looking back before boarding the plane that day, to see her family huddled together, her mother wiping tears from her eyes, her sisters waving, her father’s jaw set in a hard line. They would never return, of that Sarina was certain. She would never be welcome in her parents’ home again so long as she was married to Zachary Maxwell.

So, then, she had consoled herself, it was better that they were in America. Perhaps it was where they should have lived from the beginning. It had been hard for her grandparents and parents to accept a Westerner, a Christian, as her husband. Although Zachary practiced no religion, marriage to an outsider was frowned upon by the culture in which she lived. Her sisters married Indians of their own class. Although they were a Westernized family—her father, she herself, and her sisters and brother had all been educated in England, and the family had lived abroad for many years—once they returned to India, there was always the pressure to conform. And her mother, educated in India, had always been more comfortable with the old ways.

Her brother said that he had met Zachary on a hiking trip in the Himalayas and invited him home. From the moment she laid eyes on Zachary, Sarina wanted to lean against him, to press her body close to his, to kiss and hold him. The intensity of these feelings frightened and embarrassed her. These were not feelings one shared with anyone, not sisters, friends, mother, an old nurse, no one. Her mother’s arguments, her grandmother’s admonishments, her father’s concerns had fallen as ashes before her desire for this handsome American.

“I am telling you, Sarina,” her father said, “people about here don’t take well to strangers, and an American will never fit into our culture. You will see that I am correct.”

Unfortunately for her, he had been correct. Zachary spoke openly and too often about how much better and easier things were in America. He had no concept of how to treat the help in the fields or in the household, and he too often made inappropriate comments about things or people that upset her father and especially her mother.