A stack of books sits on a counter separating the Jeraths’ dining room from their living room. The books are all modern-day American scriptures such as The River is Mine, The Seat of the Soul and The 12 Stages of Healing. Across the room is a large, garlanded portrait of Prem Nath Jerath, a structural engineer who worked for the Port Authority. Meena Jerath turns to the books from time to time, as a means of easing the sorrow of losing her husband. In the last year, she and her 20-year-old son Neel have been desperately searching for relief.

In the beginning, says Meena, they had faith in God. She often retreated to the puja room, a converted closet attached to the master bedroom upstairs, where she prayed all day. But it only raised more questions. "You think, ‘We did good deeds and we are honest and we’ll live a good life’," she muses. "Why did this happen"?

In June and July, they even went on pilgrimages throughout India, as also to Pehowa in Haryana, meant for those whose relatives didn’t die a normal death. The night before he and his mother left for India, Neel broke down, haunted by the persistent image of an iron bar going through his father’s chest. They also went to Haridwar, but the crowd and atmosphere overwhelmed them. "It just felt like a sequence of events that didn’t help," says he. Where he did draw comfort, he adds, was in the personal contact with relatives.

He says it is mildly therapeutic to talk about his loss. When Prem was alive, they had been an extremely private family—at one point even the fact of Prem’s nightly pursuit of an mba at nyu’s Stern School of Business was kept under wraps. Now Neel and his mother are open about their lives.

Recently, Neel has taken to watching the Nightly Business Report on TV, and reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, turning to a subject he had little interest in. The trauma of his father’s death saw him perform poorly in two semesters at Brandeis, a premier university in Massachusetts. Turning to subjects his father loved most, Neel thinks, is the best way he can turn himself around. "I’m trying to redeem myself, and trying to redeem myself in my father’s eyes as well," he says.

Neel is back home now, and will attend a local college this fall. This way, he and his mother will be together, and they intend to pick up the pieces as best they can. "It’s just about enjoying our own company," says Neel, as his mother nods her head, "and not putting on appearances".

But their agony hasn’t turned them vengeful. When the federal authorities asked Meena about her opinion on the court case of Zacarias Massaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker, she told them she didn’t believe in capital punishment. "I think he should sit in the smallest possible cell and repent and apologise to each of the families," Meena says. And Neel agrees, "Sometimes logic fails us but it just seems wrong for the state to kill people."