That day I woke up in my cozy room in the Blue Merion Ct
condo.
By the age of 19, I had been in the city of Colorado Springs
for about a year and had lived in two homes already. Although I liked to
believe I was very American trying hard to be accepted in this new world, I am
very Nepali even after a decade in the US and I will be for the rest of my
life. I was lucky enough to have lived with a multi-cultural American family
for about a year. Host dad and mom were from Guyana. Host mom’s family had an
Indian heritage and host dad’s family had a Chinese heritage. They had three sons
-- the oldest with an East Asian look was from host dad’s first marriage, the
second son was Indian looking and was from host mom’s first marriage, and the
youngest son was their only mutual child with predominantly Oriental features
and subtle but unmistakable Indian look.
After some difficulty over living arrangements with this
family, I had to move out of their home which was not too far from downtown.
While I was uncertain of my college future in the US due to the lack of money
to pay rent and being too novice to work out a living arrangement, a warm and
caring lady with Italian heritage who was already giving away one of her rooms
to another Nepali student offered me her laundry room to crash in.
It was the bed in that cozy room that I had woken up in that
morning thinking of my meet with the calculus professor for the independent
study of Calculus III I was taking at the community college and the 200-level
Sociology class. I was all ready to go to the college and was drinking coffee
in the living room when the three of us saw live footage of planes flying into
some tall building the news reporter referred to as the World Trade Center. I
had vaguely heard of them but was not fully aware what WTCs were. Later I came
to realize the history and the significance of the twin towers. Much later did
I realize how packed with people those buildings usually were. It took a while
to sink in that the USA, the country that was offering me a place to stay and a
college to go to, was under attack by some group I didn’t know much about. The
only familiar name was Osama Bin Laden.
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| Ground Zero |
I went to the college. Dr. Gray, the Sociology professor, and
a handful of students were there. She
wasn’t in the mood to teach. She shared her thoughts for a few minutes about
how sad it is that religion is exploited so often for devious acts and later
advised me on trying to stay away from crowded places and staying out late for
quite a while. I nodded but didn’t really understand what she meant at the
time. I didn’t realize what she meant even after a few Punjabi guys were
attacked in New York City. It didn’t even occur to me that simply looking the
way I do could be a danger for me under various circumstances.
A couple of years later, after the Afghanistan war had
started and operation Iraqi freedom was under way, I would be in NYC to see the
ground zero, the vacant area where the twin towers used to stand.
