Dear Readers: I am so eager to get a copy of Here We Are into your hands. Due to overwhelming response, we have completely SOLD OUT! My publisher Macmillan has ordered reprints. As we wait for them to arrive, I wanted to express my gratitude to you by sharing the opening chapter of the book…

PROLOGUE

Through a strange coincidence, I met the man who ran the jail where Dad was locked up.

“How’d a girl like you start visiting Rikers anyway?” he asked me.

“My dad was an inmate there,” I said. Not the answer he was expecting.

We were hunched over a tiny oak table in one of those quaint cafés on the Upper East Side. I kept stepping on his toes, not on purpose.

The jailer, Martin Horn, happened to be friends with a genius mentor of mine. Now retired, Martin liked having meandering conversations with journalists. I’m a journalist. Only, I wasn’t on my A game. He was the one asking all the good questions, digging deeper.

“Who was the judge in your dad’s case?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Maybe I know ’im.”

Sure he does. Just like because I’m from Queens, I know everyone there. “Blumenfeld.” I humored him. “The judge was Joel Blumenfeld.”

“Is that right!” The jailer’s eyes lit up. “He’s one of my best friends. We go way back, to the Vietnam War days. Really nice guy.”

Really nice guy. Quite a tone-deaf way to describe the man who presided over the case that ruined my family, incrementally, over the course of fourteen years.

“I think you’d like Joel. Ya wanna meet ’im?” The jailer loved connecting people. “Lemme know if you’re interested.” He made it sound as casual as a Tinder date.

“Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

I said it with disinterest, but that’s only because I felt such an intense surge of emotion that my game face kicked in.

These last few years, I’d been trying not to think about the past. By anyone’s measure, I took aggressive steps to forget it. But, wherever I turned, there it was. I could never stop feeling like that teenage girl sitting in court, holding her mom’s hand, seeing her dad in handcuffs, his once-alert eyes crumbled into an empty stare. No matter how hard I tried to be someone else, that’s the girl I always was. Am.

It didn’t take longer than a week for me to accept the jailer’s offer.

Judge Joel Blumenfeld replied almost instantly. “I hear you on the radio,” he wrote in his email. “Why don’t you come by next time you’re in town?”

When I’m not chasing the skeletons in my family’s closet, I’m a correspondent for NPR. I live in California and cover the largest companies on earth, three of which are a short drive from me in Silicon Valley. I was supposed to be scheduling my interview with a billionaire who’d invested early in Facebook and Twitter—not with this judge, who was clearly off my beat. But being a journalist has its perks (namely, access). I get VIP treatment from all kinds of people who otherwise would never give me the time of day.

The judge invited me into his private chambers. That’s a place no defendant’s kid gets to go—the place behind the courtroom, where he writes his decisions about how long someone is sent to prison or whether the convicted can reopen a case.

I didn’t expect that. And, it turns out, I was not ready for it.

I went during one of my business trips to New York. I took the E train into Queens, just like I used to when I’d visit Dad in jail. That was a lifetime ago. Not much had changed: a McDonald’s wrapper tossed on the orange subway seat, the train cars rattling on the tracks like there was an earthquake. Will they ever fix these tracks?

Exiting the turnstile at Union Turnpike, I was about to make a left for the Rikers bus stop. Muscle memory. Then I remembered that’s not where I was going.

I walked down Queens Boulevard and passed the bodega run by Indians (I used to buy Doritos there, back when I was young enough to metabolize Doritos). I spotted the dusty glass storefront with the words ABOGADO/LAWYER stenciled in huge black letters on a tacky yellow awning and cringed thinking about the crap promises they’d make inside: “We’ll beat the charge. I know the judge.” As if it were that easy to buy justice in America.

When I got to the Queens Criminal Courthouse, it was smaller than I remembered. Maybe that’s because the last time I saw it, I had child eyes.

I put my purse through the scanner and spread my arms like a bird for security. Flashback to teenage me, standing in this exact same spot with Mom, my big brother, Deepak, and my big sister, Angelly. We usually talked a mile a minute. That morning, we were mute. Dad had just been arrested.

“Miss, what’s this supposed to be?” The guard pointed to the X-ray, at a black blob inside my bag. “That a baton?”

“No. That’s just my shotgun mic.” I should have left out the word shotgun. “I use it to record.”

“No recording allowed in here.”

“I won’t record anything,” I promised.

That was mostly true. Whatever might get etched into my memory, I hadn’t planned to turn on the equipment. It was with me at all times because, my editor told me, you just don’t know when a plane might crash. Always be ready for breaking news.

Up in the courtroom, I spotted the pews where the public sits. Flashback to my first time sitting here, in the second row. A defense lawyer walked up to a prosecutor, right after their hearing. I overheard them joking about each other’s golf game. They were golf buddies? I thought opposing counsel would be at war in all facets of life. Their sliver of an exchange opened my eyes to a basic fact: for most lawyers, justice is just a day job.

I walked toward the swinging doors that separate the bench from the audience. A girlfriend had recently taught me about Stuart Weitzmans, and I’d grabbed a pair off the clearance rack. Today, I’d break them in—a mistake that announced itself in each step. With my pinky toes dying a slow death, I sounded like a bowlegged tap dancer. I never wear heels. Why the hell did I wear these?

“Hi, I have an appointment with Judge Blumenfeld.” I handed the bailiff my card.

He eyed it and nodded. “Gimme a sec.”

A few feet away, there was the witness stand. Flashback to when Dad sat there. He wanted to explain what happened—to lay out the facts of his life, not just the case—and be heard for a moment. He was such a quiet man; it wasn’t like him. 

         “Your honor, may I please—”
The judge cut him off before he finished his sentence.
“Mr. Shahani, I suggest you speak with your lawyer.”
Long pause. Lump in Dad’s throat. Lump in mine.

In this room, he could not be heard—unless it was to say “I’m guilty.”

The bailiff came back and held open the swinging doors. “This way, please.”

Three men—probably co-defendants waiting for their hearing—looked at me like, Where does she think she’s going? I wondered that, too.

I turned a corner and knocked on Judge Blumenfeld’s door.

“Young lady, I told you to send me the case number.” Those were the first words out of his mouth. A scolding, which he didn’t bother to give standing still. He walked right past me over to his desk. No handshake or Hey, nice to see you after all these years. Straight to business. Though I wasn’t sure what that business was. I didn’t have an agenda. I just showed up because I couldn’t help myself.

I hadn’t seen him so up close before. In my mind’s eye, he’d been a granite-faced figure in billowing black robes. Now he was an adorable old man from the nice part of Queens: round, with pink, saggy old-man cheeks—and shorter than me, with or without my heels.

He’d told me in his email to remind him of Dad’s indictment number. I guess he’d assumed, reasonably, that I was coming for a legal opinion. I guess I wasn’t, because I didn’t bother to respond.

Still, he was prepared. Without my asking, before I could sit down, he blurted out a sentence that felt like a punch in the stomach. He said, more or less: “Your dad should never have taken that guilty plea. What a mistake. A jury of his peers in Queens—with all these immigrant business owners—no jury would have convicted him here.”

You have to stop and imagine what this felt like.

My father was arrested in 1996, along with his little brother. They were running our family business, a wholesale electronics store on Broadway between 27th and 28th Streets in Manhattan. It turns out that we were selling Casio watches and Sharp calculators to the wrong guys—to members of the Cali cartel of Colombia. Dad and Uncle Ratan were charged with money laundering, helping the most notorious drug traffickers in New York City clean their cocaine proceeds.

We hired lawyers. They told us we should not attempt to fight the charges. We agonized over it and followed their advice. And now, when the damage was long done, the man who hit the gavel was telling me what we thought was true all along but couldn’t prove: the Shahani family had a hand to play, if only we knew how to play it.

The back of my throat burned, acrid. I wanted to vomit.

The judge seemed oblivious that this could somehow be emotional for me. He talked as if we were teacher and student, dissecting a piece of case law during office hours.

“Here, have a seat.” He sat on one end of his sofa and patted the cushion beside him. “You ever ask yourself: Why was the case filed in Queens?”

Socratic method. I felt dizzy. I didn’t have an answer. He did.

The fact that it was filed in Queens, he explained, was a sign of its weakness. If it were some high-profile big win for prosecutors, they would have filed it in Manhattan, “with all the media,” he said. “They sent it out to me because they didn’t have much. They were hoping for big-time drug dealers. Instead, they got your dad and uncle.” Two middle-aged men who wore polyester pants and Velcro sneakers from Payless.

The case destroyed Dad’s career, his reputation, his will to live. It didn’t end when the sentence was over. It spiraled into more punishments than my family or the court ever expected. And now—the truth comes out—it all turned on the most basic miscalculation.

What exactly happened next, I can’t remember. Maybe I asked the judge if he was working any interesting cases. Maybe we switched topics entirely and talked about sunny California, my new home. In reality, I wasn’t listening. It was a mistake to come. I could literally feel the life I was so meticulously building break at the seams. I needed to get the hell out of his office.

It would be rude to dart for the door. I had to chitchat, politely reach for my purse to signal it was getting late. Only, when I did that, the judge reached for an overstuffed folder and pulled out an envelope in mint condition—except for the green certified-mail sticker on the front, which had faded. It was addressed from teenage me to him.

“Do you remember, I called you my pen pal?” he asked, this time with tenderness in his voice.

“That’s right.” My eyes dropped. I didn’t want to look at him anymore. “I wrote you too much.”

“Not too much,” he said. “It’s just that you cared.”

Flashback to the first time he called on me in court. I stood up in the back and the adults up front looked puzzled, like, Why does the judge know this kid? So many things had gone wrong in the case, I’d decided to write to him directly. I wanted the straightest line to justice, and I knew it wasn’t through the lawyers.

Now I glanced at the date. It was postmarked oct 12, 1999.

“Huh. That was the day before my twentieth birthday. I guess that’s how I was celebrating.”

“You were such an articulate, passionate kid.” He said it like a proud schoolteacher. That’s when it hit me: I’m not meeting this judge because he hears me on the radio. I’m meeting him because he remembers me as a teenager.

“You know how many letters I got and never answered,” he continued. “But you—I always responded to you.”

It’s true. He did. Without fail. I’d forgotten about that. I tried to put the envelope back in his hands but he shoved it in mine.

“Keep it. It’s for you.”

I didn’t know it was legal to remove documents from court records. And I didn’t want it. But I could tell I wasn’t allowed to leave without accepting his gift. “Thank you.” I slipped the envelope into my purse and stood up. “I think you’ve got some defendants waiting.”

“I always do!” he said, chipper again.

As I headed for the door, I turned back to ask just one question—not something I expected to ask, but apparently the only question I had about the case. “Do you remember my dad—Namdev Shahani?”

“No. No, I don’t,” he said.

I wished he did. I knew he wouldn’t. Dad’s letter to him—my father wrote one, too—landed on the big, fat ignore pile. While the judge could see me, the Good Immigrant who was living the American dream, he could not see the nightmare I came from, which he played a role in creating. My father was invisible to him. To this day. The judge didn’t ask, Whatever came of Mr. Shahani? I didn’t expect any different. Still, it hurt.

Speed-walking from the chambers through the courtroom—the three co-defendants sitting just as they had been—tears streamed down my face. Why are you doing this, Aarti? This is self-sabotage.

I was almost thirty when Dad’s legal problems ended—nearly half my life spent watching him decay. I had finally left home and was five years into fixing my credit score, which was a far cry from “good.” I needed to know I had a future before I could stroll down memory lane.

Let it go, Aarti. Let it go.

Only, I couldn’t.