Life after 9/11

My Sister who lives in California called me on the evening of 11 September. She was agitated, and told me what someone in her workplace was saying: "My friend says we should kill all the brown people." She was aghast especially when another co-worker asked her, "Why are you looking so sad?" A devout Buddhist, my sister abhors violence of any kind, and was devastated by the tragedy in New York and Washington. And yet, her skin seared the imagination of those who see her each day; one day, suddenly, she became a terrorist.

And so did all of us. This is not a new feeling. When I first got to the US, in the early 1980s, someone had called me a "sand nigger". Illiterate in the ways of racism I was puzzled like many immigrants, and had to ask a friend what to make of the insult. The context they was Gaddafi, and I chanced to have his hairstyle and even look a bit like him. All that reappeared during the Gulf War, as many desis who looked like Palestinians and Iraqis found themselves followed by men in dark suits. For the first few days after the 1995 destruction, of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, I was, made to feel like a terrorist again. And when I got wore of the WTC devastation, I prayed in my own atheistic way that the perpetrator was not an Arab, or someone like me. They were, and I'm a terrorist again.