Kavya having brunch at Agave in New York City

Weekends are a special time for our little family. During the week, Kavya, our 20-month-old daughter, goes to daycare, while Sona and I “work” on our novels, I go to work in Manhattan and Sona does her “work-work” (freelance articles for magazines and such) from home in Jersey City. The weekend is the only time when we all hang out as a family without the distractions of daily life.

On Sundays at noon, we sometimes go to Chelsea for storytime at Books of Wonder, a bookshop just for children. Sometimes we take Kavya to the Village and just roam around. Or we go to Washington Square for a bit of a splish-splash in the fountain, and along the way, she points at random flowers and calls them all purple. Often, we start our Saturday or Sunday with the New York institution of brunch.

To Kavya, yesterday was just another Sunday. I have no idea how or when we will explain 9/11 to her, but she will start speaking in complete sentences any day now. If it had just been me, Sona, and Kavya, we probably would have just stayed put on our side of the Hudson, taken Kavya to our local park in Jersey City, watched some Sesame Street at home, and remembered 9/11 in our own way. But, as it happened, Kathleen, an Australian friend I met while living in China, was visiting New York and wanted to see Ground Zero, as well as the Memorial Preview site.

Kathleen has traveled by herself to plenty of countries, and was more than capable of tackling New York on her own. Although the World Trade Center PATH train stop is easily accessible from where we live, we have never actively made the decision to go. This is partly because we really have no business there. Sona has never worked near there, and my work is all the way in the Flatiron-ish area at the School of Visual Arts. There is nothing all that exciting to see, eat, or do in the immediate area of World Trade except look through the boarded up and covered area where the Twin Towers used to stand. But the main reason that we both avoid it, is that it unleashes a flurry of unresolved emotions within both of us, and this is exponentially underscored on September 11th. My unresolved emotions, however, come from a different place than Sona’s, both in a literal and metaphoric sense. My experience of 9/11 was almost entirely steeped in California, and I have only relatively recently begun to understand what the New York experience must have been like. We went with Kathleen to see Ground Zero because we were both curious to see what the marking of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 meant for us, not just as “New Yorkers,” but as Americans.

Vandalism at the Dakota Sikh Temple in Fresno, California

Sona was living in New York and had just walked into work at Rockefeller Center when the attacks took place. At first she just thought there was a fire downtown.  Later, she remembers seeing the billowing smoke outside her window, the panic and fear of being in Rockefeller Center while the towers burned, eventually collapsing, and hearing rumors of more terrorist attacks. She remembered the eerie quietness of Times Square on the morning of September 12, 2001, her inbox full of emails about the harassment of South Asians, Sikhs in particular, and of her panic-stricken family in New Jersey, who worried about her safety (read her full reaction here).

While Sona’s experience was that of a New Yorker, mine was that of a Californian, thousands of miles away. Most of the people I knew – from my family, my friends, to my fellow shipmates in the Navy – had never been to New York or even met a New Yorker. We had no idea where the Twin Towers were in relation to the rest of the City. Words like “Lower East Side, Mid-town, the Village, Outer-borough, the F train, the NR, Uptown and Downtown,” meant absolutely nothing to the majority of us. So the fact that the skyline now had two gaping holes in it was, of course, monumental news, but it didn’t hold as much resonance with us as it did with Sona and her fellow New Yorkers.

The novel that I am working on weaves a narrative using the backdrop of 9/11 (as well as 1984 and elements of 1947) as part of its particular place and time. I can talk to Sona about character development, outlining, plot devices, the violence and political landscape of pre and post-1947, as well as the cacophony of violence erupting in Punjab during the 1980s and 1990s. But, ten years on and 9/11 is still a relatively fresh wound for her. She is visibly shaken whenever she thinks about it. She can’t even watch a documentary on it. So whenever I visited Sona in New York over the years, we rarely ventured into Lower Manhattan because it was painful for her to revisit those emotions. Since I moved to the area about four years ago, and explored the City on my own, my connection to the City and to 9/11 have changed drastically.

In 2001, I was at home, sleeping, when a friend of mine phoned me and told me to switch on the television. As I heard and saw what had happened, I was in shock, and devastated to see people throwing themselves out of these incredibly tall buildings in acts of sheer panic and desperation. It was really upsetting to watch how senseless it seemed and the fact that it was deliberate. It sent chills down my spine knowing that this did not take place “over there,” but had happened on American soil in “my country.”

Image of Osama Bin Laden

And then the emails started coming. First it was in trickles, and then almost a downpour.  It started with a few brown people being chased and called names in the immediate aftermath at Ground Zero or in Times Square. Then the emails started coming from around the country, especially Sikhs. And as I looked on the Internet and watched my television, I saw none of this being covered. The same footage of the airplanes crashing into the towers, the flames bursting, black smoke rising, the towers crumbling down, people covered in white ash, bodies in mid-air. This was immediately followed by an image of a turbaned and bearded Osama bin Laden. Then the rhetoric began, talks of “unity,” and  “getting the terrorists,” took over every news station without any mention of the “backlash” until a few days later when Balbir Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona was shot five times in the back by a self-professed “patriot.” This warranted a 30-second slot on the news before returning to those same images. There were stories of how easy it would be to kill thousands of people with one squirt of a spray bottle filled with anthrax, of sleeper terrorist cells, of the Middle East versus the “West,’ but nothing more about the backlash until a full week later when Bush finally made an announcement condemning these acts.

Brown skinned Americans, especially Sikhs suddenly had to prove they were American. I remember American flags being placed everywhere – in front yards, in cars, at the Gurdwaras (Sikh temple), and some Sikhs even wore these daft turbans made out of the American flag. I don’t remember any lanky white Christians doing any of that after the Oklahoma Bombing.

Sikh American Boy

What was sad about the whole frenzy of going overboard with showing our American-ness was that in the zeal to explain to the average American that Sikhs were not Muslim or from the Middle East, or followers of  Osama bin Laden, it created the impression that we were condoning anything dished out to Muslims. This impression has thankfully changed with organizations like SALDEF, Sikh Coaltion, and United Sikhs.

This “mistaken identity” was nothing new for Sikhs. Since the 1970s, Sikhs have been called “dirty Arabs,” “towel heads,” “rag heads,” “Khomeini,” “Ghaddafi,” “Saddam Hussein,” and of course, “Osama bin Laden” since 2001, as well as all the other derogatory remarks associated with members of these various communities. And before then, there was just flat out racism where Sikhs and anyone brown were simply referred to as “Hindoos,” with riots routinely taking place against them on American soil.

Ironically, the people towards whom the derogatory remarks were geared towards don’t look anything like what the media shows them to resemble. The 19 hijackers, for example, were clean-shaven, and didn’t wear anything resembling a turban, which is used in that part of the world mainly to keep out dust, rather than as a religious symbol.

And it is sad that ten years on, people are still completely ignorant of who the Sikhs are, and also so full of hate towards the perception of the “other,” who at the moment is anyone who looks like they’re from the Middle East and/or Muslim. Although there are signs of progress, on some level, traces of that xenophobia are still here in New York: reaction to the “Ground Zero Mosque” which is neither a mosque, nor at Ground Zero; harassment of Muslim women and girls who wear the Hijab; bullying of Sikh boys  in schools, where they continue to be called a “terrorist” or “Osama;” and hate crimes against Sikhs are still taking place across the country because of a “mistaken identity.”

In the coverage of the ten-year anniversary, I didn’t read a single mainstream newspaper article or watch a report on television covering the “backlash” or even mentioning South Asians, let alone Sikhs. We have largely been left out of the narrative of 9/11, as if there wasn’t a single brown life lost in the Towers, and there were no brown firefighters or medics who rushed to the scene. If we base our perception of 9/11 from the news coverage or what’s presented by Hollywood, you would think that New York is a racially homogenous city.

Yesterday, as we ventured into the City with Kavya saying “hi” to everyone like it was just a regular outing, I was worried about a return of the xenophobia that had paralyzed what seemed like all of America, if not the world, in the days, weeks, months, and years since 2001.

There were several vague announcements in the media, including one by Mayor Bloomberg about the Terror Alert in NYC. He told New Yorkers to be on the lookout for three men of Middle Eastern origin, “possibly in a van.” What about a brown couple with an 20-month-old on a train to World Trade? Or three South Asians talking on their cell phones in Time Square? How about four Muslims sitting on a bench together? What about one? Should we report it just to be on the safe side?

NYPD Police Officer With Assault Rifle on September 11, 2011

Police officers were checking bags at the subway and the World Trade PATH stations. They were all over the streets of lower Manhattan, going all the way to Chinatown and Little Italy (where the San Gennaro festival was still going on), checking IDs to make sure people lived in the area and were who they said they were. Without these IDs, residents weren’t allowed to even enter their apartment buildings. The police were wearing bullet-proof vests and carried guns and assault rifles. It all felt surreal and didn’t feel like the New York I had grown to love in the past five years of living and working here.

A wave of emotion overcame both me and Sona, and we left the area rather quickly. We walked to the Village, to the Highline Park, to Chelsea Market, and found a bustling New York full of energy. Eventually we made our way back downtown to grab a bite to eat in Chinatown, where my friend Kathleen and I reminisced about Northern Chinese food, our old friends in China, the paranoia of SARS, how awesome the film “Contagion” was, and she told me how “nice” she thought New Yorkers were. Both Sona and I laughed when she said it, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized how true it was.

As strange as it sounds, I have yet to meet a rude New Yorker. I am sure they are out there, but I haven’t met anyone genuinely rude. I have met grumpy New Yorkers who complain about absolutely everything you could possibly think of; New Yorkers who are in an absolute rush for everything: work, entertainment, shopping, food, walking, exercising at the gym, even going for a beer at a bar can become a stressful situation. Some even have stress-face when they’re “relaxing” in a bikini on the Great Lawn at Central Park.

But those same grumpy, stressed out people have always stopped and offered to help lift Kavya’s stroller over the turnstile or up/down the stairs whenever one of us takes Kavya into the City. Strangers are often good sports about engaging Kavya in conversation. If she waves at them twenty times or says “hi” to them a million times, they have always responded. I have forgotten how often I’ve asked people for directions to a particular subway line. Once an NYPD cop pulled out an iPhone and even wrote down the specifics for me on a piece of paper!

It was nice to see the rest of the City behaving normally without policemen in riot gear ready to “get the terrorists.” People were all remembering in their own way. Some businesses had an American flag in their window, others had sales on white roses, and bakeries had commemorative 9/11 cupcakes. After walking in silence for what seemed like ages, we slowly made our way back to Ground Zero, where we’d grab the World Trade Center Path train home to Jersey City.

Ribbon of Remembrance at Saint Paul's Chapel

There was still a crowd, but it had greatly diminished. The big screen was off. Nobody was making galvanizing speeches. The police had mostly disappeared from the immediate area. There were firefighters sitting outside a bar having beers and talking about people they had lost. People were hugging one another. There were ribbons of rememberance outside Trinity Church on Church and Vessey, with heartfelt words written on them. The atmosphere was that of resilience, a word I associated with the rhetoric of 9/11, but one I came to understand last night. The Memorial Preview Site had closed its doors for the night, but there was a video on a flat screen in its windows that showed what it was going to look like. It looked impressive, with a futuristic design, but it left me feeling funny. Maybe, like my wife and my daughter, I’m just slowly becoming a New Yorker – and finally feeling the weight of what that means, ten years post-9/11.