On the morning of Black Monday, Sept. 15, Mona, then six months pregnant, was outside an operating room waiting to have a mastectomy because of breast cancer. Her husband knew Lehman would be declaring bankruptcy that morning.
"We weren't talking about my surgery," she recalls. "I kept asking him, 'When the company goes bankrupt, do you still have insurance for THAT day?' "
For the last few years as Amar watched Wall Street banks unravel and his own investments founder, he had tried to ratchet back his family's lifestyle.
"I wish we had invested more conservatively," Mona says, "but when you're on Wall Street that's the game because you know, or at least you think you know, so much you can be a millionaire in 20 years and get out."
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They had tried to get out after Sept. 11, 2001, when Mona spent the day roaming Queens Boulevard where they lived as she waited for her husband to come home. His office was adjacent to the World Trade Center towers that fell. He made it safely to Queens that night, but shortly after, the Monds fled to California near Mona's family for a less pressured life. But after two months they were back in New York, and Amar was on Wall Street.
"We realized we had gotten used to the pace of the city," she says.
After returning they bought their first house, the three bedroom with the half-acre yard in Colonia, N.J., a leafy bedroom community in Middlesex County. It didn't match their shiny dream house; still, Mona was able to furnish it to their taste. But after a few years, as Amar saw home prices climbing, he was convinced the bubble would burst. The Monds sold their house and moved to a two-bedroom apartment in a modest complex filled with immigrants from India.
"Here in Jersey you just have to have a house unless you're just a fresh immigrant," says Mona, who thinks she should be past that stage. Twenty years ago, she moved from the Punjab state in India to Santa Clara, Calif., where she lived with her parents in another two-bedroom apartment.
"It's ironic but I feel even poorer now," she adds. "Maybe it's because . . . we got used to having things. Now we want things more, and it's heartbreaking for us."
The couple hadn't owned the Colonia house long enough to make much of a profit, and whatever they made was piled into investments that soured with the credit crisis or stagnated in markets overseas.
