View from a Distance

Ten years later, Baradwaj Rangan looks back at the country he left, the country that seems, somehow, so different today.

The morning two determined terrorists, within a span of twenty minutes, brought down a couple of skyscrapers and snapped America’s spine, I was beginning a day of work in a suburb of Chicago. There was no reason to believe that September 11 would be any different from September 10, the Monday that had begun the week. I switched on the computer and scanned my list of things-to-do, but I cannot remember, today, the exact nature of the work I was preparing myself for, or maybe it was one of those weeks following a project deadline, so there was nothing to do but sit in your cubicle and look busy and wait for Friday. It was still summery enough that things could be done that weekend, outdoorsy things. My mother and aunt were visiting from India and weekends were inevitably spent outside to compensate for their imprisonment Monday to Friday, when they would pretend to be content watching videocassettes from the Indian store.

One of these movies was playing when I strode into my home midmorning and surprised my mother. When routine is broken, the first instinct that grabs anyone is that something is wrong, that something has happened. “What is it?” she wanted to know. Something about a terrorist strike, I said. I walked to the television set, turned off the movie, switched to a news channel, and sat down. But for the ticker-tape headlines marching across the bottom like rows of orderly ants and the television channel’s logo in a corner, I might have tuned into another movie, one in which Hollywood’s special-effects wizards had once again demonstrated their peerlessness in blowing things up. Even at work, as my ashen-faced manager told us that there had been a terrorist strike and that there were hints that more was to come and that we should go home, we weren’t quite prepared for what had really happened. Terrorists strap bombs to their bodies and press a trigger and kill heads of state, or they whip out guns and train their firepower on innocents. Who could imagine that terrorists would hijack aircraft and plunge into stately buildings?

It was so unbelievable, so inconceivable that we needed these images on television to give shape and form to what the news anchors were describing, and to confirm that these crumbling smokestacks were once the World Trade Center, which signified New York in the establishing shots of movies and therefore signified – to the rest of the world – America the strong, America the rich, America the beautiful. Here was America the broken, with lives being lost like blood in a hemorrhage. I didn’t know yet that a college-mate who I dropped out of touch with was in one of those planes and that days after the news of his death reached his wife she would end her life. Long ago, back in India, I remember being woken up from bed with the news that Indira Gandhi had been assassinated, and later, that Rajiv Gandhi had been blown to bits. Those, I thought, would be my remember-the-day-Kennedy-was-shot moments, my generation’s touchstones of true tragedy. Here was another and it was far worse.

And seen from today, it appears that things have only gotten worse for America, which is no longer the promised land our forefathers dreamed of attaining, the fruits of their penances. The phrase “America-returned,” so cherished at one time by matchmaking parties and head hunters of multinationals, is now tarnished with the reality that an increasing number of Indians are returning from America, though when I returned, in 2002, the flood was still a trickle. Indians, today, come back because they’re stuck in middle management with little chances of promotion, or because they’re tired of being viewed with suspicion and subjected to more vigilant searching at airports because their skin is brown, or because they know that now they can get everything they want back here, including home-delivered pizza to go with a rerun of The Simpsons. With the right kind of money and the right kind of job, they are realising that India can be America – the perks, after a while, are so much better that you almost stop complaining that you step out of your house and step into shit.

In those respects, even these ten years later, India hasn’t quite become America, and a friend I met recently – a friend who lives in Holland and who said that the people there are so uniformly white and Christian that any outsider is treated coldly. and that when he walks into a store and the attendant walks out and finds that it’s a brown-skinned foreigner her friendly mask freezes automatically – explained that there was a difference between “quality of life” and “standard of living.” The standard of living in India is now almost on par with Europe and America, he claimed, because the differences in salaries are insignificant. But work-life balance and clean urban spaces where you aren’t reluctant to take walks and which don’t flood up after the slightest drizzle – that’s quality of life, he said, and that’s why Indians like living outside India. But after 9/11, after the grim reality check that bad things could happen to them too, that they could be invaded and flattened the way we have been for centuries, he said that that feeling has begun to fade.

In the first years after my return, I wondered often if I’d made a mistake. But those images of terror and those days of bewilderment would flash before me and I would make my peace with my situation. Besides, from America, bad news followed bad news – the banking crisis of a few years ago, the current debt crisis, the rampant unemployment. How these calamities would have impacted my life had I stayed back I cannot say for sure, but my friends, the ones who remained, tell me that things are no longer the same. It is no longer economically advantageous to be there because your dollars aren’t getting converted to untold riches back home, where no one wants your Ferrero Rocher chocolates because they can get them at the store down the street. As for that other factor, quality of life, it’s still an attraction, though one whose cost Indians have begun to question. So what changed, really, after 9/11? After all, bin Laden is dead and America, whose demise he plotted, is still alive. But barely, I think. This is no longer the strong and proud nation it was to millions of Indians. It is tired and scared. Along with the smell of smoke and burning bodies, Americans smelt fear that September morning. Ten years later, that fear is still in the air.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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