She thought about traveling for a bit, perused the old India travel guide she’d come across in her father’s box. The memory of her day with her father at the Taj Mahal returned to her full force. She wished she’d been more grateful to him for taking her there.

Exodus perched nearby. She cracked it open, perused the poems. Kavita, the sentient poet, seemed to be the polar opposite of Deepa, the impenetrable grandmother. In “Engine,” she wrote:

I will lay railroad tracks across continents, one plank after another in perpetuity. Look for my reflection in the rails, listen to the vibration of my voice.

Why must words fail me now, when only syllables can bridge the distance, the gap of our sorrow, the abyss between our entwined souls.

How different would her grandmother’s life had been—would Shan’s father’s life had been—if Deepa had learned to open herself up to others in the same way she opened herself up in her poems?

She pulled her laptop closer. In the search engine, she typed Kavita Grover writer.

Several entries appeared. Most of them belonged to journalists. She tried again with Kavita Grover poet. Then Kavita Grover Exodus. Nothing of significance appeared. This was not surprising. The book’s copyright, 1986, predated the internet. It seemed Deepa would continue to elude online, as she had in real life.

Shan leaned over the desk, picked out a few dead leaves from the plant pot on the windowsill, turned it slightly, so that it received more light. If Deepa—a woman who lost her parents, her adoptive parents, her son, who dispensed with her only friend—was still alive today, how would she be moving through the world? What would her life look like?

Shan imagined the meals eaten alone at the kitchen table, the nights curled up on a bed without the body heat of another, holidays spent in solitude. To lose so much, to endure so many consecutive losses in isolation was something she couldn’t quite comprehend.

She flipped to the dedication page in Exodus.

Amir Rahim.

If Deepa was so keen on never being found, on never being known, she would never have dedicated the book to Amir. Despite using a pen name, she couldn’t resist leaving a clue to her past in her volume of poetry.

She turned back to the screen, typed Deepa Khanna Partition, scrolled through the results. Nothing on point. She then tried Kavita Grover Partition.

A few pages in was an entry for an organization called the Partition Project. A header in black cursive spread across the home page. A yellow box highlighted its mission statement. Since its founding in 2004, the Partition Project’s mission has been to collect as many stories as possible from firsthand witnesses to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan and upheaval in the the years that followed.