8/11 - 9/11/2001, Memories of an overseas visitor, by Arjun Rajagopalan
From MemoryArchive
Who: Arjun Rajagopalan What: 9/11 When: August 8, 2001 Where: WTC
Having spent a sizable portion of our formative years in the USA, my wife Gita and I sent both our children, Ashvin and Kavita, to the United Stated for their college education. My daughter Kavita had been accepted at UNC-Chapel Hill for the fall of 2001. This was her first visit to the USA, and, to help her settle down and handle the cultural transitions, Gita and I accompanied her, planning to spend a few weeks at Chapel Hill with her. Kavita's first halt was at New York and so we did the usual sights of the city before moving on to her college. Ashvin was beginning his senior year at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and considered himself a seasoned New Yorker. My digital camera logged the date on this picture as 8/11/2001 - exactly a month before. (Incidentally, those of us in the British-descended, English speaking world, would have called it "11/9", but, it will always be "9/11" for eternity, I suppose.) The towers are so iconic of the city that during subsequent visits, I cannot get used to the idea that they are not there. This is a picture of Gita and Kavita at the Statue of Liberty with the WTC behind them.
This is a picture of the two of them in the plaza between the towers. We have made numerous trips to the WTC in our previous visits. It was much easier to get tickets for Broadway shows at the TKTS in the mezanine. The lines were always shorter and you didn't have to figure in the weather like at the booths in Times Square. The subway, too, was more accesible. Gita particularly remembers a very cheerful and enthusiastic waiter in a restaurant in the underground shopping areas. She still wonders whether the guy made it out.
And, I suppose, every tourist must have done this. The plaza makes it easy to get this shot unlike at the other NYC skyscrapers.
After settling Kavita down in Chapel Hill, we came back to NYC to spend time with Ashvin and then left to visit my brother in St Louis, a couple or so days before 9/11. We had gone out for a walk in a nearby park in the suburb of St Louis where my brother lives, and came home. The first person to tell us about the horror was my niece from Chennai, India, from halfway across the globe. Within minutes, news had gone around the world and she called because she wanted to know whether her cousin Ashvin was OK in New York. We switched on the TV and to this day, I cannot believe what we saw. The surgical precision with which the act was performed, is terrifying.
By now, all telephone lines to New York were either clogged or dead. Ashvin managed to get an e-mail out saying that all hell had broken loose and "the city was shutting down". His dorm has a balcony with a grandstand view of the towers, from which the kids saw the second plane going in. We lost all contact with him for several days, and, but for the e-mail, would have spent an agonizing few days waiting for news. He was supposed to have gone downtown to visit my cousin who works in the city and who needed to give him something. Ashvin's room mate, Jason, is the son of a lawyer whose office is smack opposite the WTC. On that particular day, Jason's dad had to attend to some legal work in Long Island and had not gone to the office in the morning!! He didn't enter his office for almost a month after.
Back in St. Louis, the USA shut down all air traffic. We were scheduled to fly to the West Coast that afternoon. Kavita, still nervous with the strain of settling down in a new country, was completely thrown by all this. We managed to rent what must have been one of the last available cars and drove down from St Louis to Chapel Hill to be with her. All along, for the first time in my experience, we drove on the highways without seeing a single jet contrail in the sky. Somehow, it was eerie.
