Three Countries, Two Suitcases, and a Wedding Four Days After 9/11

In September 2001, the question was whether the wedding guests would arrive. Sonny Saggar and Jayne had arranged to marry at the Music Stand in Tower Grove Park, St. Louis, just four days after the attacks on New York and Washington. Flights were disrupted, relatives were stranded, and the certainty that normally accompanies a wedding schedule had disappeared.

The story begins with a small victory: his parents arrived half an hour before the ceremony. Morning suits were handed over, everyone changed, and the wedding went ahead. In the memoir, Sonny remembers the day with warmth, anxiety and a characteristically dry observation about wedding planning.

That opening scene says something about the larger book. A life can be carefully constructed and still refuse to follow its own instructions. There may be less certainty than expected, and more kindness than predicted.

Sonny was born in India and grew up in Britain. The family story began with his parents moving from India to the United Kingdom. Growing up in Southall meant learning to inhabit overlapping identities: a household carrying Indian culture, a British childhood, and the everyday questions people ask when they think a person can belong to only one place.

He moved to St. Louis in 1997 for medical training. He met Jayne in a Barnes & Noble bookshop. Their wedding, planned in an American park, became a story of transatlantic family, interrupted air travel and a planetarium reception. The planned first dance was a Queen song; the spontaneous first dance took place to Frank Sinatra at a hotel in Clayton.

Medicine and business offered absorbing work, ambition and purpose. Family life brought children, commitments and decisions that did not fit neatly into a career plan. Later chapters consider divorce, financial changes, prosecution, incarceration, and the difficult work of rebuilding relationships and an everyday life.

This memoir does not present its author as a flawless hero, or suggest that loss can be reversed with a clever idea. It looks instead at the distance between what we expect our lives to be and what they become. It also makes room for laughter, affection and people who turn up when it matters.

What connects the countries in the book is not simply geography. It is the persistence of family: parents who had moved countries before their son did; children growing up with their own questions; an elderly mother on the other end of a call. The meaning of home changes as the story progresses.

For readers interested in migration, British Indian identity, medical careers, family, criminal justice and second chances, I Do, in Other Words offers one particular human account rather than a universal formula.

The best place to begin is the actual prose. The complete prologue, Four Days After, is available here to read free before deciding whether to buy the book.