By Anita Chikkatur

I hope that by July New York will be closer to the city I love.

New York City is not my city by birthright. I choose to call it my city. My family moved to the city in 1989. I was an 11-year-old with an ego that was a bit bruised and a soul that was a bit wounded after her first five months in the United States. During these first five months spent in suburban Colorado, I had learned that I spoke English with the wrong accent (van, not wan) and spelled English with the wrong vowels (color, not colour). I felt that I did not belong, which was a very new feeling for me. I had come to feel very uncomfortable in my brown, immigrant, Indian skin.
My first couple of years in New York did not do much to build up my ego or to heal my soul. Junior high school was not much fun and I was still haunted by all those voices that had warned me about the dangerous New York City. I did not start my love affair with the city until I started taking the subway from Queens to the lower edge of Manhattan to attend high school.
Now when someone asks me where I am from, I usually say, “New York.” I fully expect them to know where the city is and that when I say “New York,” I mean the city, not the state. This is not to discount the first 10 years of my life spent in India, the months spent in suburban Pennsylvania attending college, or the last year and a half of my life that has been spent in Japan. This answer acknowledges my pride in being a New Yorker. For the first time since I had my sense of belonging taken away from me, I have a place where I feel like I belong. I belong in New York City, not because everyone else is the same, but because everyone else around me is different.
Everyone talks about how the city is diverse and how this diversity is its strength. For me, its diversity was the thing that finally healed my soul. I learned to be comfortable in my own skin again. I sat on the subway and listened to people talk and laugh in many languages. So I felt comfortable chatting away with my friends in English or joking with my mom in Kannada. I saw people wearing anything and everything. I felt comfortable in an old pair of unfashionable jeans, my new stylin’ black pants or a salwar. I saw people eating foods from all over the world. I felt comfortable taking a peanut butter sandwich or my mom’s curry and rice for lunch.
So I am proud to be a New Yorker. However, I am not always proud to be an American. I am not the kind of American who applauds everything our government does. Even at a time like this. When I landed in JFK this December, for the first time after Sept 11, my first feeling was a sense of relief. The city that I love and take enormous pride in was still there. It was still the vibrant mix of cultures, languages, foods and smells that I remembered it to be. Then I stepped down from the bus from the airport and onto the streets of my neighborhood.
I am immediately struck by the number of American flags I see. Pasted on store windows, car windows and home windows. Flying on car antennas, store fronts. A huge one hung up in the middle of a street. And what I feel now is a bit of uneasiness. I wonder how many of these people truly felt patriotic and how many felt compelled to put a flag up because of the consequences they would suffer if they didn’t. (My neighborhood has a significant population of American Sikhs, who became the target of attacks during the days after the terrorist attacks.) My house is no exception. We have three small flags on our front windows. One of them is a wall hanging that my father received when he first came to the United States as part of a Rotary International exchange program. I wonder what had prompted my parents to put these flags up.
I talk to a friend born in New York City who feels like she can no longer live here. Not because of the terrorist attacks, she says, but because it’s too cold. We talk about the plane that crashed in Far Rockaway. She thinks that there was a bomb on the plane. If not, why did that story disappear from the news so quickly? She also believes that President Bush knew about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and let them happen. Then we could go to war and make the weapon-making companies, his big supporters, rich. Needing to do so for my own sense of sanity and security, I tell her that I don’t think that’s true.
Later that night, my dad and I get into an argument about how complicit the U.S. government policies were in leading to the attacks. He believes that, regardless of what led to these attacks, the United States had a right to attack Afghanistan. In self-defense. We argue about what it means to be patriotic. We continue this argument on a later day and our argument extends to some of the major conflicts of the day - the India and Pakistan border issue, the violence in Palestine and Israel. I have no convincing answers to his demand for alternatives for the violent solution currently being employed by the U.S., Israeli and Indian armies.
I come to see those flags on our front window as an act of patriotism by my father.
The next day, on my way to see the remains of the World Trade Center, my dad talks about how the Transit Authority, his employer, did not get the deserved appreciation for its work after the attacks. While there are quite a few subway lines that run under or very near the World Trade Center, no one who was on a subway during attacks got hurt. The Transit Authority also quickly got the system rolling again and organized alternate routes into and out of the city. Although unacknowledged, he feels like a part of those “uniformed personnel” who have gotten much deserved praise for their work during and after the attacks.
I get out of the subway at Chambers Street. A subway station that I am familiar with, having used it during four years of high school. I walk out and am immediately assaulted by a sharp smell in the air. It’s quite faint and nothing compared to what it used to smell like, my mother informs me. I walk down to the West Side Highway to see that my school, Stuyvesant, is still standing there. And it is.
Then I look down the street. I cannot picture what the view used to look like. We walk down to where the remains are. By the time we reach the police blockades, both my mom and I are totally disoriented. I have spent four years of my life staring out at this landscape. I have spent countless hours, hanging out with my friends in the buildings after school. I have seen the city skyline with the twin towers thousands of times. My mother has been there several times and was even close enough on the 11th to watch the buildings collapse. But we cannot imagine the buildings being there. I am thrown off guard by this feeling of disorientation and am glad when we walk back to the subway station.
The next day, I am in another subway station. I catch the eye of an elderly Muslim man in a white cap and a beard. I look away quickly, as my heart speeds up. My mind flashes to one of those doomsday scenarios I had seen on TV about anthrax being dropped onto a subway platform. I am immediately ashamed, but I cannot deny the sudden flash of fear. I think about how when I first moved to the city, that sudden flash would have been at the sight of an African American guy.
The day before, the topic of racial profiling had come up in a discussion with a friend who is a law school student in the city. We talked about how the new victims of racial profiling in the United States are Arab Americans, Muslim Americans or anyone who looks like they are Arab or Muslim. She said that in her classes they talked about how many African Americans were supportive of the new racial profiling. I read an article in The New York Times about how Blacks who had not voted for Bush are now supportive of the president.
It’s a crisp, sunny winter day when I emerge from the subway station. I walk around one of my favorite neighborhoods, Park Slope, savoring the sunshine and the sense of security that I still feel on the city streets. I take a deep breath and inhale the smells of pizza, fresh bread, Chinese food. I am not worried about another terrorist attack as I walk down 7th Avenue; I am not worried that a car will run me down as I cross streets. I believe that this sense of security is my right. It is something that all human beings should have as they walk down their streets. At this point in history, this is not reality in too many places in the world. But I am not apologetic for my own sense of security.
Later that afternoon, as two Indian American friends and I chat at a pizzeria, my sense of security crumbles a little. We are discussing the events of the 11th and the second plane crash in Far Rockaway. One of my friends offers an explanation for why news media lost interest in that crash. It was full of people of Dominican origin. If the first disaster had occurred in Harlem, for example, and had killed 3,000 African Americans, what would have been the reactions of New Yorkers, of Americans, of people in the Middle East, of Muslims, of people everywhere in the world? Maybe for New Yorkers and Americans, it would have been the same. After all, it still would have been American space being violated. (And perhaps Bill Clinton would have been there!)
As we talk and eat, I feel like we are being stared at. We are three women who could possibly be Muslim or Arab. I think about how claustrophobic all the flags are starting to feel. Later, one of my friends reveals how a couple of weeks after the terrorist attacks, when she was at McDonalds in Chinatown she had a glass of coke thrown at her. She doesn’t really know why, but figures it was directed at her because she was mistaken for Muslim or Arab. Suddenly, I no longer feel very comfortable or secure.
I wanted to end this story simply. I wanted to conclude by saying that my city is not the same. That it is not intact in spirit. That I no longer feel comfortable in my brown, immigrant, Indian skin. Then a friend points out that New York City was not a perfect place before Sept 11. I realize that while I was away from the city, I have begun to idealize it. When I tell my students, teachers and friends in Japan about New York, I tell them all about its most wonderful quality — the diversity of its people. I do not tell them about the innocent Black man who was shot to death by the police. I do not tell them about the Indo-Caribbean man who was beaten to death by racist neighbors. I do not tell them about the time when two Indian American friends and I were told, “Hindus, go home.”
The city was not perfect before Sept 11. However, I had a sense of comfort and acceptance as I walked its streets. The possibilities of identities, diversity of groups, and diversity within groups had seemed infinite to me as a teenager, finding her own niche in the city. Now, in a city where there are constant reminders (the flags only being the most visible examples) to be “American,” these possibilities seem limited. Achieving, accepting and celebrating a truly multicultural, multilingual diverse society seemed much more possible in a New York City where the flags of the world were displayed at Rockefeller Center, rather than a hundred U.S. flags.
Sitting on the plane heading back to Japan, I hope that when I come to the city in July, it will be closer to the New York City that I proudly claim as my city.

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