[Reader-list] Some of my September, 11th 2001

[rehan ansari]

On Tuesday, September 11--> By: Rehan Ansari
 September 13,2001
I woke up this morning to an absolutely gorgeous blue day outside my window in Brooklyn, New York and hysterical voices over the television. As I got out of my room, a housemate, Mark, walked in and said the World Trade Center Towers were burning and one of them had collapsed. I went with him to the television screaming in his room and within minutes saw the other twin tower give way. The event on the screen was so filmi, it didn't register. 

The doorbell rang frantically. It was Gabriel, a young woman asking for Heidi, another housemate. They both work for the mayor's office and September 11 being municipal election day, they were supervising polling booths and assigned Wall St. She had seen the WTC burning and had immediately started moving away from the area. She walked from Fulton Street in the financial district over the Brooklyn Bridge to this house in Fort Greene in Brooklyn (a walk that should been an hour-long stroll in normal circumstances). 

She was intensely worried that Heidi had not come back nor phoned her safety. Since the time she had left the area, the 110 storey buildings had essentially collapsed on everybody on Wall St. 
After letting a cup of tea compose me, I walked out of the house to a nearby park which gives a panoramic view of south Manhattan from across the East River. It was still a perfectly blue sky and the Fort Greene neighbourhood, a remarkable example of mid 19th century domestic architecture, as beautiful as ever. The highest point in the park has The Martyr' s Monument, a symbolic tomb of 11,500 men who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. From the vantage point of the monument I saw a huge plume of black and brown smoke rising from where the WTC stood. The plume was going straight up in the air.

I went back to the house to call everybody that I knew who was working in Manhattan. As I got in another co-worker of Heidi showed up, sweating profusely and covered with soot, asking if she made it back. We went inside and Chazz told me of the scene at the Brooklyn Bridge: people walking in unbroken numbers from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Paper was flying everywhere, burnt currency and, most of all, legal-sized paper. He swore some of the ash that was falling was human remains. He also asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Pakistan in New York for the summer he said, gently, that the xenophobia is going to begin and I better keep my face and accent from the streets. By the end of the day, with the media painting a picture in the face of unclaimed responsibility - somehow bin Ladin's operatives were more and more visible to surveillance and leaving trails everywhere as the day progressed, whereas they were invisible over the course of the planning of this incredible operation - I had shaved off my beard.