Nepal, Dec. 14 -- In the suspended, hovering pieces of her life, she had always kept herself apart, a careful distance from the faces and places that drifted through her days. She pushed them away softly, deliberately, as though the gentlest force might spare her the hurt of letting them stay too long.

She had long carried a faith in universalism, a thought she had once scrawled in haste: that belonging meant stretching oneself outward, beyond the tight walls of nation, race, religion, and all the brittle cages we build around ourselves. And yet now, as time poured on, unyielding and relentless, she felt an ache she did not recognise, an ache for something fixed, something ordinary, something she might at last call home.

She, too, had l...