Jaya watched television all day and the following days, as Karina played with wooden blocks and tottered around the house in Jaya’s high-heeled shoes, all permitted so long as she was safely out of view of the TV. Jaya watched through streaming tears as people posted homemade signs all over lower Manhattan, for boyfriends, sisters, fathers and roommates who had gone to work on a clear Tuesday morning and had not been heard from since. Behind all these seekers and tellers, a gargantuan pile of rubble rose from the ground, smoke climbing from the wreckage while brave firemen trudged atop the mass in the vain hope of finding somebody, anybody.

Keith was alive only due to his arbitrary meeting schedule. She was only here in this country because of a chance meeting at a pub in London. Now the borders were closed, shutting her off from the rest of her family. All their lives were ruled by the whims of fate, and this realization made her feel powerless. This was the world in which they were raising Karina, into which their son would be born—this ugly, cruel, awful, dangerous world full of horror, where planes flew into buildings and people jumped from towers.

That had been eight years ago, when she recognized how the world was filled with dangers unseen and unanticipated. But this time, they had not been fortunate enough to escape the worst. And now, in her grief, her love for Prem had no home.

8 | Karina

June 2009

Two weeks after Prem’s cremation ceremony, a period during which Mom had hardly left her bed, she finally wandered down to the kitchen, hair mussed and a sour smell trailing her. Karina was so surprised to see her that she just sat at the kitchen counter, watching as her mother opened the refrigerator and stared blankly inside before saying, “We don’t have eggs?” No one had been to the grocery store in weeks. Dad had been sustaining himself on black coffee, and Karina on cold cereal.

Something sparked inside Karina with the simple query, something her mother might have said Before. “I . . . I’ll go next door and get some,” Karina said. “Be right back.” She ran out the front door in bare feet and crossed the dewy lawn separating their house from the neighbor’s. A few eggs. A few eggs would make things better, would make her mother happy, would bring normalcy back to their home. The guilt and shame that had been burning inside her for weeks abated for the first time as she knocked on the neighbor’s door.

Karina returned a few minutes later with a full carton and set a pot of water to boil, rushing around the kitchen to prepare everything the way her mother liked, the way she and Prem had helped their father make it for Mother’s Day—a hard-boiled egg, seasoned with salt and red chili pepper, buttered wheat toast and a sliced banana—the kind of breakfast she’d never seen at her friends’ homes, filled with chocolate chip pancakes and waffles. She took the tray upstairs, but her mother had fallen asleep again, curled tightly into a ball, clenching a pillow to her chest like a child with a stuffed animal. Karina placed the tray next to the bed, where it sat untouched until her father later cleared it away.