This Fall

Is this how it felt to live in Rome? At the start of the decline, I am sure things 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 morning 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.