In This Together

It has been two weeks since New York was ravaged with terror. Life cannot go on as before. For most, last week was worse than the week before, as the comforting numbness waned and terror came screaming back into their lives.

People talk of nightmares. Violent dreams peopled by terrorists, confusing montages of buildings and airplanes and fire and destruction and chaos. And then they awake and discover that there are no phantom fears any more.

Much has been made of America’s loss of innocence. A fairly open and free society—at least for most people—now has to adjust to the rigors of added security and suspicion. And the legitimate fears of those of us who look different.

Indian, Arab, Middle-Eastern, Asian…shades of brown that made up part of the much touted and often faulted American melting pot. No, things have never been perfect here. Yes, racism exists. But for the most part, most of us felt comfortable, traveling, talking, working and living here…never digging too deep. For this is the country with which we have cast our lot and this is home, where we live, love and work.

Suddenly, any color but white and black are suspect. Any name that sounds Muslim is dangerous. Last week I grappled with changing my own last name. It is a proud name, this name of my father.

As I was growing up it stood for honesty and values and tolerance, stubborn determination and secularism, and gradually it became fully a part of my personality. A worthy counter-weight to my long first name. But today I wonder. I wonder about what will happen when I travel. With my brown skin and distinctly Islamic last name, will I be under additional scrutiny? Will people look at me with suspicion? Should I…should I change it? For convenience? For safety? To protect others I love?

I have always lived as a minority. I know no other reality. In India, as a child and a very young woman. In America as a young woman, student and professional. It’s not that I am naïve about what my role is as a minority. It’s just that the ripple effects of this event are truly unfathomable. Or perhaps I am now old enough to truly understand the vast incomprehensible nature of this thing that has happened. I cannot put my arms around this change to understand it.

This pulsating fear and anger I feel is truly global. It reverberates in the rhetoric I hear around me. “The New War,” “World Commitment,” “Global War Against Terrorism.” Now that terrorism has made its way from the other people’s backyard into the forefront of the American consciousness, the overtones have become un-localized. The sleeping giant of World War II, awakened now from its ethnocentric slumber has decided that terrorism is a world problem. Now that terrorism has stopped being a safe sport watched from a distance, its fires stoked by various government policies and has destroyed innocent American lives, the time has come to act. Because innocent American lives are somehow more valuable than innocent lives other places in the world. And because there is suddenly a starker new reality, an vs. them. And I don’t know which side is mine. The side of my name and ethnicity, or the side that I have made myself? Which side do others see? Which one am I?

That is what is unfathomable. It does not matter what I truly believe in. It does not matter that I have not, and never will live in a theocratic state, on principle. It does not matter that any terrorist attack in America is likely to include me on the victim list, not on the perpetrators’—I fly often, I work in the corporate world. Nothing matters, except the color of my skin and my last name. Whenever I fly now, in the United States or outside of it, my identity will be subsumed under the trappings of my skin and my name. Not that anything negative has happened to anyone I know… yet.

There are reports of vandalism, name-calling and, in one instance, the death of a Sikh man in Arizona. He looked Arab to a racist redneck. The community of Mesa has rallied around the Sodhi family, setting up an impromptu memorial site with flowers, candles and messages for this Sikh-American victim.

But then there are the phone calls. From people I have not heard from in months. From those I have known for just days or weeks. “Are you okay?” “Hope no-one has been harassing you.” “Call if you need any help.”

There is an author I am working with who has opened up his beautiful home and those of his friends, in upstate New York to international students and other newly arrived foreigners trapped in the city, to get away for the weekend. To recharge their batteries, deal with their terror, make new friends, to recognize that terror is not the only reality today. I have a friend who invited her middle-eastern and Indian friends for dinner… just because.

Just to talk. Just to empathize. Just to break bread with friends, regardless of color and religion. Just because we are, like it or not, in this together, and for the long haul. In this changed and scary world.