September 11, 2001 (excerpt) 

The time I spent focused on my family didn’t set me back. It gave me purpose. I joined my first political campaign; I became a U.S. citizen; and, for the first time in my life, I felt I knew my father. He wasn’t a stranger or an enemy. He had become a friend—a three-dimensional man I admired for the responsibilities he shouldered at my age and whose ups and downs taught me how the world really works.

Before heading back to the University of Chicago, I needed to swing by Washington, D.C., one last time. The Texas group had a breakthrough. A much larger organization wanted to adopt our cause as theirs. The American Civil Liberties Union had a new executive director, thirty-six years old, openly gay and Latino. He wanted to make Fix ’96 a priority. Like any good leader, he knew he had to convince his followers. He’d invited us to speak at his first board meeting, to help earn their support.

The only problem was the timing. I was supposed to take Dad for his “check-in.” It wasn’t like the prep school check-ins, when someone wanted to know how you were feeling. It was the immigration-prosecutor type, when an agent wanted to make sure you knew you were a dog on a very short leash. Dad had to go to another office building, 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, once every two weeks. It was a meeting where he could be suddenly redetained, without notice. I’d been going with him because I didn’t want him going alone. Only now, I really wanted to go to the ACLU meeting. We were on the verge of historic change. I could feel it. I was going to help make history.

“Dad, do you mind if Deepak goes with you?” I asked. My big brother offered.

“Is it necessary, doll?” Dad meant the D.C. meeting. Even though I got involved because of him, he reacted sometimes just as he did to Mom’s tenant meetings in Flushing. He wanted us to be home, not fighting the good fight but eating a good dinner together.

“Yes, Dad.” I got annoyed. “It’s necessary.”

“OK, my doll. Be wise.” That’s how Dad said good-bye. Be wise. He didn’t want to upset me. Our relationship had come a long way. He was raised believing he was supposed to be the master of his home. While he still tried to be with Mom, he stopped trying with me.

I boarded Amtrak before 7 a.m. It was a full train, the rush-hour commute from New York to D.C. The train would arrive around 10 a.m., which gave me thirty minutes to speed-walk to the board meeting. Minutes before pulling into the final stop, the train stalled.

“What the—” more than one passenger grumbled.

“I hate Amtrak . . . This is why we need to defund Amtrak,” some guy across the aisle said, loud enough to get a lot of chuckles.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor came on the loudspeaker, “trains have been ordered to stop.” Yes, Sherlock, we got that. Only, he didn’t sound robotic. He paused, needing to take in what he’d just heard. “We’ve been told the Pentagon has been hit.”

Gasps down the corridor. “Oh my god . . . that can’t be.”

Moments later, someone shouted: “The World Trade Center has been hit. The Twin Towers.”

“What?” I found myself shouting. “My brother works there!” That’s where Deepak went every single morning. I started to panic. Did Deepak finish Dad’s immigration check-in? Did Deepak go back to work?

A passenger reached over to lend me his BlackBerry. “Call. See if you can get anyone.” The call didn’t go through. The lines were jammed. 

More news streamed in, from the conductor, from the people with phones: 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower; 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 into South Tower; 9:59 a.m., South Tower collapses; 10:28 a.m., North Tower collapses.

The train sat still. I had one hour to imagine the worst. My brother was under rubble. My brother was burning alive. My brother jumped out of a window, to his death, to escape death by fire.

The man with the BlackBerry passed me his phone again. “Keep trying.”

I finally got a hold of Deepak. “You’re OK?!”

“We’re OK. We’re OK.” He told me to stay calm.

Dad and Deepak were at Federal Plaza when it happened. The officers working behind the glass broke the news and told everyone to evacuate the building. They were swept into a procession, tens of thousands of New Yorkers flooding the streets and heading north. Deepak turned back to see a gaping hole in the North Tower, where he worked. Dad had a hard time keeping up. His foot was going numb lately. He held Deepak’s arm for support.

“Is Dad with you?” I asked. “Lemme talk to Dad.”

He passed the phone.

“My pichikery. I never in my life thought I’d see such a thing. The buildings fell down. BOOM. One after the other. So terrible. Arre baap re! ” Dear Lord. As they marched, he kept turning back, seeing smoke billow from the ashes. They passed Canal Street; then Varick Street, where Dad had been detained; then 28th Street, where our store used to be. They paused so Dad could catch his breath. One pizza place was charging ten dollars for a bottle of water—price gouging in a moment of crisis. Another gave water out for free. The totality of human nature came out. I told Dad I was on Amtrak and that the Pentagon was hit, too. He didn’t know that yet.

“Come home, doll. Come home.” He didn’t want me out there alone.

“I can’t, Dad. I need to go to the meeting.”

My train pulled into the station. My meeting wasn’t canceled. The ACLU powerhouse wasn’t jumping ship. While we didn’t know who was behind the attacks, we knew the campaign we were working on—for immigrant families like mine—had nothing to do with it. We had to push on…

Here We Are is the first memoir on post 9/11 America written by a South Asian American — an intimate, on-the-ground account that is not revisionist history. You can order your autographed copy here.