On the plane back to the US, Gita felt inert. When a baby cried in the crib at the front of the cabin, beneath the movie, she didn’t offer to help the mother by carrying and shooshing it, as she usually did. When she had said goodbye to her family Delhi Airport, that large, airless shed with its many cracked tinted windows, gummy-wheeled carts, and floors still bleeding with a mixture of lemon cleaner and pure mud, she hadn’t cried either. She felt she was bidding her parents and brother goodbye one final time; she wanted her eyes to be dry so she could have a real look at them and store their visages in the deep freeze of her brain, to be taken out and examined in the vacuum of life in Midland—a life she needed to embrace as her own.…