[Reader-list] This Fall

[rehan ansari]

Is this how it felt to live in Rome? At the start of the decline, I am sure 
thing were very good.

Things look so good that it is hard to believe they may decline. So I am not 
certain. Would I give it a 50/50 chance?

The night has a nip in it. Its clearly fall now. This is the season when I 
first came to the US as a 17 year-old student.

Fall was possibility.

This fall morning I visited the site of the World Trade Center. Before 
leaving, I looked it up on the web to see if there were any recommendations 
on how to best view the site. I had heard that there was a viewing platform 
and I wondered if it was still there. I didn’t find that information, but 
what I noticed was that several sites were referring to something called the 
WTC "pilgrimage."

I remembered a net to phone conversation with my uncle Ifti in Lahore, who 
responding to how many times he saw the towers come down on television said 
that he thinks WTC will be an American Karbala. How will Americans perform 
maatam, I wondered. That wondering was before they started bombing 
Afghanistan.

The site is no longer a scene of a crime, a gash in the concrete and steel 
heart of New York. It is now a construction site, neither more nor less 
interesting than a bunch of cranes and bulldozers cranking away. Nor was 
there a viewing platform anymore. I was relieved, it would be a nightmare to 
peer down into nothingness.

The site is fenced off but from a corner, one can see the construction. That 
is where the tourists assemble. Most of them are blatantly not New Yorkers. 
I saw one though, in a business suit and heels, her office could not be too 
far, with tears in her eyes.

Someone was passing out leaflets proclaiming, "Homeland Insecurity." She 
gave one to a police officer managing the crowd. The officer accepted and, 
though busy, but not that busy, kept glancing at the fine print in the 
flyer. I reached for one, laughing. It said that the US needed to halt 
immigration as the enemy was already within the walls. It also specified 
that there were 30 million immigrants in the country, and that 40 percent of 
New York was foreign born.

New York would not remain New York if it the world of people and markets 
ceased to come here.

Could it ever happen that stock exchanges of Shanghai and Singapore become 
more important?

I started walking towards Broadway. At the corner was a church whose 
perimeter fence was covered with flags, mementos, t-shirts, firefighter 
helmets, poetry, photographs and other remembrances of the tragically 
departed. In the corner someone had also stuck the front page from the New 
York Post newspaper, that had a picture of Saddam and headline blaring, 
"Bomb Iraq!"

I took the subway to Union Square where on Fridays there is a farmers' 
market. Farmers from upstate drive in with their tomatoes, melons, fresh 
baked bread and set up stalls. I bought an egg plant, bread, tomatoes, fresh 
mozarella cheese and walked back to the subway. Close to the subway entrance 
on the south west corner of Union Square, before I went underground, I 
glimpsed the statue of Gandhi. So he was back. He had been missing for 
almost a year because of park construction at that end.

I took the Q train to Brooklyn, which travels over the Brooklyn Bridge, so 
that from the subway car you can see yourself leaving Manhattan. The city 
looks magnificent this fall, I hope nobody ruins it.






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