Early Tuesday morning it seemed like the only language that could make sense of what was happening in New York was Urdu. The only words that could expand to the drama and enormity of the collapse of the twin towers were words from a language that has all but become a secret code for us – where a carefully selected noun could quiet my rage against a rude shopping assistant, quell my irritation at pushy commuters in the subway, express disapproval of surly little kids bossing their parents around.

            Now all those little things were amounting, well, to very little. What was happening literally a mile and a half from where we sat could only find expression in our own language.  When the towers finally collapsed onto themselves all that seemed to stand before us was the tabahi and a mass grave.  It was strange how closely we were rooted to it as it stands for all things American; the size, the commerce, the constant frenetic activity – yet we were never more Pakistani than we were that day or ever since.

            We live right across the river in a commuter’s community. Almost everyone here works either on Wall Street or in the World Trade Centre complex, including my husband. We live here, so that he can go work there. The towers were our backyard, our train ka platform, a place to meet up after work and go home together, arrange to rendezvous with friends on the concourse.  We ate there, we shopped there, we banked there.  All my qeemti jewelry is in a locker there; we attended concerts in the piazza.  It was the reference point that I gave all our visitors in case they got lost in the city - “just ask to go to the World Trade Centre” – it was my own private lighthouse guiding me homewards when I lost myself in the labyrinth of streets that make up lower Manhattan.  It was a reassuring sign late at night as we made our way home that we were finally getting close, it was our night light, our visibility manual – when you could count the lit floors of the towers it was unanimously decided by all that it was a beautiful clear night. It symbolised so much to so many people and to all it was a part of everyone’s landscape – it was as black and white as that. But the morning it was attacked, the explosion blew everything into technicolour. Our befores were the flashback scene in a movie, grainy and monochromatic in this country of political correctness, our afters have become deeply tinged. Coloured mostly by hysteria, prejudice, fear, suspicion, forced and in some cases, heartbreaking assimilation. “You are either with us, or you are against us” is the only thing that remains black and white.

            There are more stories than can be recounted here of the kinds of discrimination and retaliatory attacks that have taken place across the states, across a wide spectrum of social instances. They happen everyday against anyone who is deemed to be one of “them” or one of us. We have become as we say and as they say, pariahs. It is a sweeping, far-reaching discrimination that, ironically, doesn’t discriminate. The only prerequisite is that you be brown. (You may or may not have an accent.) You rack up more points if you are brown with a beard. Still more if you are brown with a beard and a turban. Then of course, you are also no longer a Muslim, you are Sikh. But that is a trifling detail. If you are a brown woman, you may have it easier. Unless of course you are a brown woman who covers. Then it won’t be that easy. What is even harder is if you are brown but not the right kind of brown – in which case you may still be harassed and discriminated against – but you will eventually be apologised to and let go. Things have become, as they say, very hairy around here. There is a moratorium on all other racism. All eyes are now on the hyphenated foreigners – Arab-Americans and American- Muslims. 

               The Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has had more than 625 reports of harassment, attacks, vandalism and violence.  And these are from those who are willing to rock the boat.   There are too many here who cannot risk such an undertaking and continue to be the targets of this country’s ignorance and blind rage. Those who are most in the public eye are often those who most need to be – shopkeepers, cab drivers, people who work for the city and street vendors among them. Though they are facing some of the most pernicious forms of harassment, people who work in the private sector, in government departments, multinationals and students are not exempt. While you work on the street you may be spit at, called a “sand nigger” and told to go home.  Sitting at your desk or in your class you can be isolated in more sophisticated ways. You can be harassed publicly and you can be harassed officially. I’ve heard us telling ourselves that these are exaggerated accounts – ‘nothing happened to me when I was out.’  And it’s true, nothing has happened to me that could rival what I’ve heard. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. You can put on any channel at any time of the day and find a middle-aged white man telling you ‘America will prevail, we have nothing to worry about, we should not be afraid.’  He then, sometimes, caps it off with a solemn faced appeal for American Muslims. ‘They are not to blame, they should not be attacked, Islam is not a religion of hate.’  I hear him but I have a hard time believing that he believes himself. So I don’t believe him. And neither do a lot of other people it seems.

            So far, there have been two confirmed cases of people killed in hate crimes, one of them a Sikh store-owner. Those are the big stories. There are hundreds of smaller stories, the ones that reporters get to and can be found on the inside pages of some of the newspapers – but almost none of the television networks – and then the ones that you hear from your family and friends at the end of a long day. A cousin almost driven off the road because she was wearing a hijab. A man who looked “vaguely Arab” taken off first class in a plane and arrested because his frequent seat changing was making the crew nervous. An older relative arrested and detained for six hours because he made a wrong turn somewhere and decided to ask a policeman for help. My younger brother asked by an American colleague on his college campus if his “country was going to help or needed to be bombed too.”  A Brazilian senior editor at The New York Times spread-eagled and handcuffed in midtown Manhattan because he was wearing a kufi. Little children being told by their classmates that their daddys’ will ‘take care’ of their entire families. All this seems to be almost mundane compared to the heap of bodies still lying under two 110-storey towers just across the river from us – are we so self absorbed?  Perhaps a little. But then a lot of people are also very scared. They are facing, wholesale, a form of persecution for which they have no redress and no voice. A form of persecution that is almost singularly impossible to fathom against any other race or religion on this scale in this country at this time.

            The best you can do is to try and blend in. So you see flags and testimonials everywhere – we are Americans too, we feel your pain, can you feel ours? It seems not, because right now to be considered a real American you have to look like a real American – you have to fly your red, white and blue and be either several shades lighter than you are or several shades darker. This is no time to be in the middle of the spectrum. There is no middle ground here. You see the biggest flags and the most earnest voices in cabs driven by South Asians, in storefronts owned and run by Arabs, outside Islamic centres filled with Muslims at prayer.  These are people who may have lost loved ones and are now also dealing with the trauma of the blame. These are people who still have families waiting to come over after separations that have been unbearably long, being told to go home. Immigrants who spent their lives trying to get to the home of the free and land of the brave, trying desperately to be free and brave.