On the day of the reading, the author consented to a brief tour of the Morningside Heights apartment where he and Nair have lived since 1999. “This is Zohran’s bedroom, untouched by displacement,” he said, pushing open a door to a tidy, dormlike sleeping quarters. A shelf over the bed held sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, boyhood guidebooks (“The Way Things Work”), and a worn copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader.” A portrait of a teen-age Zohran, by the Pakistani painter Salman Toor, hung from a wall, along with a sign that read “Hippies use side door.” Asked about its significance, the father shrugged.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter