Eva Narula is still grappling with despair over the loss of her closest friend, her sister Manika. She and her parents traveled to India this March. Her relatives asked her how she was doing just as they had asked her a year before, when they last visited. They knew Eva and Manika, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, had been inseparable. "That's when it hit me that my life was on pause," says Eva.
A couple of weeks ago, she and her parents decided they had to clean out Manika's room. They had put off the task as long as they could, but with the second anniversary of her death approaching, they were about to begin an open paat, a month-long reading of the Guru Granth Sahib. Manika's room was the only space large enough. Eva and her mother found one of Manika's old handbags. It contained random notes, phone numbers, makeup, her gym pass, ID cards, packets of Equal.
"Just things," says Eva. "Everyday things. But it was like her touch was still on it. I don't think me and my mom have ever cried so much."
Photograph: Paresh Gandhi. Text: Arun Venugopal. Excerpted from India Abroad's Magazine Special on the Survivors of 9/11