Frail is the human being, with a million shortcomings. But you are omnipresent and you are merciful. Since you have given us birth, you will also bear our burdens. Jaya let those words wash over her, penetrate her, envelop her. A deep, visceral comfort emerged from falling into the rituals she had practiced as a child.

On the third repetition of the verse, Jaya felt her breath slow and deepen. She straightened her back and let air and prayer flow through her body and cleanse her soul. Her mind detached from its aura of pain and connected to something deeper, something outside of her. After two more repetitions, her mother slowed down on the final verse and they concluded with a resonant, “Om shanti, shanti, shanti.” Peace. After a long moment, Jaya opened her eyes and saw the beautiful shrine before her, noticed intricate carvings in the wood and the detailed expression on the face of the Shiva figurine. She blinked a few times, uncertain what had just happened to make her feel lightness for the first time since she had lost her little boy.

* * *

Jaya began to join her mother at the shrine every morning, a reason to get out of bed along with the sacred obligation to bathe before prayers. The time she spent chanting and singing created a kind of numbness that buffered her from the anguish she otherwise felt in her waking hours. She spent more and more time in that state, drawn to the comfort it provided. As sitting on the floor came to feel natural again, Jaya reflected on her mother’s observation that she’d become too American.

It used to be that every time someone asked Jaya where she was from, she had a difficult time answering. She’d explain that her parents were from India and she’d been born in Delhi but had lived all over the world when growing up. Earlier in her life, she might have described herself as European, having spent her adolescent identity-shaping years in Portugal and Ireland. Now she was considered American and expected to hyphenate her identity between the country where she began her life and the one where she now lived. But did that term, “Indian-American,” truly capture her identity? Had she not met Keith that night at the pub, Jaya might have happily stayed in London for the rest of her life. Or moved to another country in the world, where her international policy work took her. Or even ended up back in Delhi when her parents resettled there.

“Indian” represented the most meaningful part of her—the culture and history she felt running through her blood; the language, food and music that made her feel at home. It was an inextricable, essential part of her; not just what she had been born with, but what she embraced. “American” represented the choices she’d made as an adult—the man she’d chosen to marry; the children she’d borne, Prem, with his love of baseball, and Karina with her stubborn independent streak. This was the place where she’d chosen to make a life, standing up and taking the oath of citizenship with tears in her eyes in a government building over a decade ago.