She wanted to be a diplomat and make her country proud, but on Wednesday Sabika Sheikh’s coffin, draped in a Pakistani flag, arrived in Karachi, the city where she was born and raised. This is not how her parents had expected to welcome her home. Last Friday morning, in the small rural town of Santa Fe, near Houston, Sabika was killed in a mass shooting by classmate Dimitrios Pagourtzis. She was one of the 10 who died at the hands of the gunman, who had taken his father’s registered weapons to kill innocent people. At the time Sabika faced her last moments, her parents were in faraway Pakistan. Her father, Aziz Sheikh, had just finished iftar and logged on to his computer. There he saw what had happened and that the shooting was at Sabika’s school. Terrified, he called her host parents, Jason and Joleen Cogburn. The next hours were the worst of his life, and they ended with the words no parent should ever have to hear: “She is gone, she is dead.” Pakistanis are constantly sending their children abroad to seek better lives. Sabika was one of those children, mature for her 17 years and eager to make a contribution to the world. In a YouTube video she uploaded soon after she was selected for the exchange program that took her to Texas, she exclaimed she was “over the moon” at the opportunity. When she arrived in Texas, she gifted Joleen Cogburn a prayer shawl from Pakistan. Weeping, she wore it to Sabika’s funeral prayers. The death of Sabika should prompt everyone to consider the connections between the pain of some small town in the United States and a family in bustling and frenetic Karachi. This connection of pain, in all its tragedy, illustrates how parents and communities can be united in the face of unspeakable catastrophes. No one would have predicted that a girl from a city where shootings and murders are an everyday occurrence would die in a small town in Texas that has a very low crime rate. Undoubtedly, her parents, like all parents who have to send their children away to pursue better lives in faraway lands, told themselves that she would likely be safer in Santa Fe than in Karachi. This was not the case. According to preliminary investigation reports, the gunman knew at least some of his victims. While it is not clear whether he knew Sabika, the contrast between the two is chilling. On one side, Sabika, a child of light and hope, eager to represent her faith and her country in a school whose students and teachers likely knew very little about either. On the other, a boy attracted to hatred, wearing Nazi symbols on his clothes and posting pictures of his T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Born to Kill.” On the day that she died, Sabika had spoken to her younger sister Soha, who is only nine years old. She told her younger sibling that there were only 20 days left before they would be reunited. Sabika would not make it home alive, but the fact of her death does not mean that the forces of darkness and hatred that Pagourtzis represents have won. True respect to Sabika’s spirit and commitment to mutual understanding means upholding the positivity and optimism that beam out from all her smiling photographs. Sabika was not afraid; she believed in the possibility of human beings to rise above ignorance and racism; she believed in the possibility of a better world and her role in it. Why else would a child leave a home that she loved and the siblings and parents that she adored for a foreign land? Even in death, Sabika has continued to bring people together. Her funeral prayers brought about 2,000 people to Houston’s Masjid Al-Sabireen, many of whom had likely never been inside a mosque. The Spring Interfaith Dialogue Council, a group that promotes interfaith understanding, issued a statement saying: “We stand with you in solidarity and will continue to work to end the prevalence of gun violence in our schools. We will hold her memory close and ensure that her legacy lives on in Houston.” The group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America also expressed outrage at what happened to Sabika. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who represents Houston, and the city’s Mayor Sylvester Turner also expressed their condolences. None of this, of course, provides any solace to the parents and siblings most hurt by Sabika’s loss. In an instant, it seems, a family in Pakistan was caught up in an epidemic that is taking so many lives in the US. Along with all of the American children who have died because of senseless gun violence, because of political apathy, because no one was willing to protect them, there is now one Pakistani child. A bright, smiling young girl from Gulshan-e-Iqbal, who was fasting when she was killed, whose name was Sabika Sheikh. • Rafia Zakaria is the author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan” (Beacon, 2015) and “Veil” (Bloomsbury, 2017). She writes regularly for The Guardian, Boston Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. Twitter: @rafiazakaria