Trupti Pandya sits in a women's shelter in Gujarat, India, working to reunite displaced women with their families. She traces villages on Google Earth, makes phone calls, and pieces together fragments of memory and maps. A few residents watch quietly as she works, learning to ask questions, and witnessing the slow unraveling of other women's stories. Then, one of them, who herself is displaced from her own family and home, folds her hands and says softly, "We will pray that she reaches home." The moment stops Pandya cold. How does someone in the midst of their own exile still find space to wish another well? This is not a lesson from any manual; it's something arising unbidden in that cramped room, a quiet choosing of compassion over contraction. Perhaps the real work happening here isn't the paperwork or reunions, but this: the discovery that even amid one's own loss, the heart can still expand. That suffering doesn't have to close us. That we can give, even when we feel we have nothing left.
