Over Seema’s objections, she leads Nafeesa through the store, and they rummage through baskets and racks, adding to their purchases—a nightcap and a pair of gloves and socks for me, the same blue as the blanket, bibs, and sleepwear.

Next door is a bookstore. Nafeesa, energized now and finding a ready ally in her younger daughter, begins browsing the children’s section.

Seema follows reluctantly, leery now that her mother and sister have joined forces. She’ll have to put her foot down, or she’ll be railroaded by them the rest of their stay. “My son is not going to read books any time soon,” she tells Tahera.

“Stop saying that,” Tahera whispers sharply. “It will remind Ammi and make her sad. Let her do what she wants. See how happy she is.”

Indeed, Nafeesa darts around with an armful of books—alphabets and numbers, farm animals and fairy tales—unable to stop herself, intent on showering me with an entire childhood’s worth of books.

The store has an international section too. There are no books from India, but Nafeesa finds a shelf with a smattering of books from England. “Look, they have the entire Faraway Tree series.” These are the books her daughters read repeatedly—about three siblings who find magical lands at the top of a tall tree reaching into the clouds—before they moved on to more mature fare. There are still shelves in their home in Chennai lined with books they’d devoured during their school years, even if the lending libraries they’d frequented had one by one disappeared.

Tahera exclaims over the series, pulls out her favorite, and sits down to read. Nafeesa searches for Seema to tell her of her discovery and finds her in the poetry section.

“They’ve changed the names,” Tahera complains when Nafeesa returns with Seema. “Bessie is now Beth, and Fanny is Frannie.”

The disappointment is fleeting. Soon both daughters are flipping through the books, reading snippets to each other, recalling other favorite passages that they must read immediately, and even—here Nafeesa chokes up, for it has been years since she’s witnessed anything like this—even peeking over each other’s shoulders to read a page. How often she saw her daughters reading this way as children. Her heart pounds with the pleasure of the sight.

Seema buries her nose in the pages and inhales, green apple and dried wood. There’s something so essentially bookish about that smell that she can convince herself it’s the same smell her own well-thumbed copies once possessed. Were they still there gathering dust on some shelf? Or did her father get rid of them as she’d been told he got rid of everything else that belonged to her?

She collects a copy of each book in the series. “Tahera, will Arshad and Amina like these?”

Tahera ponders the question. Amina is the right age for the series. But magic and pixies and goblins? She has not permitted Arshad the Harry Potter books, which have been hard to ignore, with posters everywhere of the movie series, dark images of grimy kids and wizards and witches brandishing knobbly wands. Ismail is not concerned they’d corrupt Arshad, but he leaves decisions about books and movies to her.