It was almost as if New Jersey doctor Suvarna Parikh felt the massive rumble of the earthquake in her Marlboro Township home – so shaken is she by the deaths of relatives back in her native Ahmedabad, India.
Now, like countless local families who lost relatives in Friday’s massive earthquake, Parikh is struggling to accept her loss.
“We’re trying to figure out what we can do to help, but we’re so far away,” she said.
On Friday night Parikh, 62, gathered with 15 family members who live in New Jersey to mourn the loss of five relatives who perished in the quake.
Since they couldn’t be at funeral services for the victims, the New Jersey contingent of the clan sang Hindu songs here in their adopted land.
Yesterday, Parikh was thinking of her niece, Jayu Panjabi, 49, a lawyer who was killed by the tremor just as she was stepping out of her family’s home.
“I’m hoping that her soul will rest in peace,” she said.
In July, Panjabi flew in for Parikh’s daughter’s wedding, and helped her aunt orchestrate the complicated and beautiful three-day affair.
“It was great to have her here,” Parikh said. “She was a great help to me. We were just looking at the video of the wedding, and we can’t imagine that this has happened and we’re never going to see her again.”
Parikh rushed to contact relatives in Gujurat state – where the quake hit the hardest – as soon as she heard about the disaster.
Fearing the worst, she called a dozen family members in Ahmedabad, but couldn’t get through.
Then she went online and was shocked to see her nephew quoted on an Indian news Web site, telling reporters he was torn between identifying his wife’s body at a local hospital and rescuing other relatives trapped in the family’s three-story building.
A phone call confirmed the tragic news: Parikh’s niece had perished along with her in-laws and their two kids. Their bodies were dug out of the rubble six hours after the quake.
Yesterday, Parikh spoke to her bereaved nephew.
“He was very emotional,” she said. “He doesn’t know how he’s going to get his life back together. He’s lost everything.”