Why 2 years after 9/11, this seems to be the New York state of mind: ‘It was just a day like this…and today’s just another day’
Speak with any New Yorker this week and his favourite line seems to be, “it was a day just like this”. We sit looking out of the 18th floor at the World Financial Centre and my host, a Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal honcho, looking at the silver silhouette of an approaching plane in glorious sunshine, recalls how “it was a day just like this”, exactly two years ago when the two towers across the street were brought down by planes just like this and rewrote the course of history. For a year, the Journal scattered its staffers all around the city and the suburbs until their building was fit and functional again.
A new feature on the landscape is now the ferry-boats on Hudson river, the commuters’ mainstay since the underground rail-link, crushed under the impact of the collapsing towers, is still not operational. Step out of the building and you see the giant scar where the towers one stood, now ringed and patrolled by armed police cars. You would think that this is only because of the 9/11 anniversary. But ask people around and they tell you the police are always there now, much in the fashion of the police back home who take such good care of a house after it’s been burgled. Many other predicaments seem commonly shared by democracies as far apart as India and the US. Two years on, there is still controversy and confusion on what to build in place of the towers. Friends and families of the victims even launched a billion-dollar competition for an architectural design for a memorial that would also back ten million square feet of office space. But they apparently forgot to ask the guy who owned the towers to begin with and he now asks who gave the others the right to decide what to do with his property.
Negotiations are now on and chances are — even in a society run so cold-bloodedly by the law of torts — he will have to submit, at least to some extent, to public opinion. It’s cruel that fate decrees that your property is the recipient of the most spectacular terrorist strike ever and then that you cannot even call it entirely your own. Morally and emotionally it belongs to all of New York, and since it is in so many ways a multinational microcosm of mankind, if not the world’s capital, all the rest of us think we should have a little bit of a say there as well.
Also read: 18 years after Sept 11, we live in a post-post-Cold War world
At 4.30 in the afternoon, Central Park is awash with sunshine, a crisp breeze and full of joggers, walkers, readers, do-nothingers and the world’s most well-behaved dogs who stroll around making acquaintances and exchanging Chinese whispers of sorts in what looks like a well spread out canine kitty party. At the edge of the 59th street promenade we finally find a kiosk for some coffee. As we settle down to chat, Philip Oldenburg of Columbia University and one of the most seriously knowledgeable students of Indian politics and society also notices the plane over-flying us and says, guess what: “It was a day just like that.” I tell him how quickly, and fully, I think the city has recovered from the trauma and then ask him how do people respond when they see walking reminders of the tragedy: People who’ve lost limbs, or carry visible scars of burning. “There aren’t many of those,” he says, “you either died, or escaped.” It wasn’t possible for anybody trapped inside to survive.
As the city took the first shock, he remembers, its response was to line up for relief and rescue. There were lines outside blood banks, for examples. But nobody needed it. If you were caught inside, you were dead, and reduced to ashes. If you jumped out, like so many did, some even holding hands in that last, brave gesture of love or friendship, you were a mangled mass on the street. But the city also recovered faster than you would imagine. Now, even on the anniversary, there is no tension, there are just memories and pain. The one reminder, perhaps, is the helicopter Philip says he saw circling The Reservoir in the Park, the main source of the city’s water supply. Who knows, they were fearing somebody might attempt to poison it. New York can carry on with life, but won’t take chances.
Also read: Al Qaeda recruited 40,000 new fighters since 9/11 attacks. Clearly, the US Army failed
Osama and his thugs were obviously so blinded by hatred, and so turned on by the idea of killing such a large number of rich, young Americans and causing such a sensation, they did not realise what a blunder it was for them to choose New York. Even my Sikh taxi driver interrupted a long and very serious conversation on the accident involving hockey star Jugraj Singh to make this point. “If he had only killed Americans, only America would have gone after them,” he says. But by choosing New York, and that too the World Trade Centre, he killed people from all over the world. So they are all after him now, he says. He is also kicked by how this has turned the fortunes in the taxi business which, in New York, can be more cut-throat and competitive than investment banking and is now dominated by immigrants, many with dodgy documents, from the subcontinent. The Pakistanis no longer get visas. Those who are here without them are being picked out and sent back in chartered flights, he says with so much delight. “And you know what we do if we want to scare a Pakistani even inside a grocery shop? We just start talking loudly of Osama and Al-Qaeda and the Pakistanis get scared, as if there were cameras in the ceiling,” he says. It is a different matter that the sardarji, with a copious, black and flowing beard, has not gone home to Jalandhar even once since he left in 1990, “harassed” by the police at the peak of Khalistani terrorism. “There’s been no better time than this to be an Indian here,” he says, and then gives his insight as to why: “They know we have been the victims of the Muslims for much longer than them, they know nobody hates the Muslims as much as us, not even the Jews.” But he is more amused by this than kicked in a particularly malevolent sense. The prime space on his mind is occupied by hockey. Why do they have that K.P.S. Gill there? What does he know about hockey? Why can’t they get a former hockey player, somebody like Surjit Singh (also from Jalandhar) but he died in a road accident. “Those guys” drive so badly in India, without seat belts and now I am told highways are better (good ho gaye ne)…” and he was such a tough full-back, the Pakistanis didn’t dare to even come close to him for he would break their shins and ankles. That was done with the delighted anticipation of an out-of-work orthopaedician.
It’s a matter of time before airlines either start declaring special discounted fares for the 9/11 anniversary or declare it a kind of international day-off from flying. Two years on, the British Airways flight has an empty front section, such a rarity in these boom times for aviation. The airline has just upped its fares 30 per cent on its India flights, among its most profitable with Air-India ceding all of the high-value traffic to it. Members of the cabin crew debate whether the empty seats are because of the reopening of schools or the fear of a 9/11 anniversary strike and then conversation shifts to who was where when the attack happened and what does the senior stewardess say but, “It was a day just like this…”
And how things have changed. In the old days they used to tell you to securely lock your baggage, now they tell you to check it unlocked at American airports. They routinely open and rummage through your checked-in baggage, not relying merely on the x-ray machine. Worse, they do it when you are not looking. Then they pack your bags back and leave a nice, printed note inside, apologising if they have disturbed the contents of your bag and thereby inconvenienced you. But the other change is that nobody is complaining. The world is learning to live with terrorism, putting up with its occasional shocks, minor inconveniences. You may call it wishful but here’s a thought on the second anniversary of 9/11 from ground zero: Is terrorism losing its shock value? Does this devil defang itself with each bite it takes?