We had a 10-month-old baby and a four-year-old. “Go home,” everyone said-but we were home. We made lots of calls, but we were told over and over that it couldn’t be and we would have to leave the country. It didn’t seem possible to us that one small detail couldn’t somehow be rectified. We couldn’t believe it when our lawyer told us that he had missed a deadline for filing one of the documents, so our application wouldn’t be processed, after all. It was March 1999 and our visas were going to expire in December, so my husband made a routine call to our lawyer to check on our green card application status. We knew getting the green card was a very long process, but we were okay being patient, even though everything in our lives was contingent on getting that green card. We had come into the country legally-he from India and I from Bangladesh-as university students, and we had done everything by the book. Fans of Samira Ahmed, Tahereh Mafi, and Randa Abdel-Fattah will find Sabina Khan’s powerful work timely and affecting.Can you share what happened to you and your family in 1999 and how that experience led you to write Zara Hossain Is Here two decades later?Īt that time my husband and I had been living in Corpus Christi, Tex., for nearly eight years he had a work visa and I had a dependent visa and we had applied for a green card through his job. Moorjani effortlessly moves between generations and cultures with comfortable familiarity, drawing on her own Indian American background. Zara, however, refuses to stop fighting for justice.
Her parents can’t imagine feeling safe ever again and are ready to return to Pakistan. Suddenly, the eight years that Zara’s family has spent waiting for their green card approval could amount to nothing. Her pediatrician father impulsively rushes out to Tyler’s home, but the confrontation ends with a gunshot. When his golden-boy status can’t save him from suspension, he retaliates with a middle-of-the-night trespass at Zara’s house. After Zara refuses to stay silent while Tyler and his cronies hassle a new student from Colombia, Tyler’s hate lands as vengeful graffiti on Zara’s locker. Making her solo audiobook debut, Richa Moorjani affectingly channels Zara Hossain, a Corpus Christi, TX, high school senior who stands up to Tyler Benson, the school’s football star who’s also a racist bully.
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