Seeking Solace in My Notebook: A chapter from "At Ground Zero"
By S. Mitra Kalita

While many reporters rushed toward the burning buildings in Manhattan on September 11, S. Mitra Kalita, a business reporter for Newsday’s New York City edition, interviewed residents and business owners in the Muslim neighborhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. Fearing a reprise of the anti-Muslim backlash following the 1993 bombing of the WTC, a halal butcher shuttered his store early that day. A hijab-clad woman described being treated like a terrorist, and a drunkard who saw Kalita entering a Middle Eastern market cursed at her. Two days later Kalita profiled a Muslim deli worker serving the rescue workers at Ground Zero.

Before and after September 11, Kalita, twenty-six, endeavored to cover the South Asian and Arab American communities. Since joining Newsday in the summer of 2000 she has covered the city’s business beat, focusing on small business, immigrant entrepreneurs, and the airline industry. She is at work on a book about immigrants in suburbia told through Indians in central New Jersey. Kalita previously worked as a reporter at the Associated Press. She has interned at the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This book was published in 2002 by Basic Books.

I was getting my teeth checked.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I sat in a dentist’s chair. Earlier that day, I had seen on the morning news that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I still have no idea what caused me to click off the TV. Perhaps it was the year I spent as a wire reporter in suburban New Jersey where plane accidents seemed as common as car crashes. But I dismissed it. I did—probably a Cessna or a student pilot—and I walked the two blocks from my apartment to the dentist.

“You hear about the plane crash?” he said.

I nodded, silenced by the gloved fingers in my mouth.

“Terrorism,” he declared. “It’s definitely terrorism. Two planes? Too much of a coincidence.”

Two planes? I sat upright, practically banging my head on the lamp attached to my chair. Terrorism? That’s not what the morning news had said. And there had only been one plane a few moments ago.

“That’s right. You’re a reporter,” said the dentist. Then, calling into the hallway for his assistant, “Get the radio in here.”

As we listened, the dentist gently pushed me down and continued his work. When he left for a moment, I again sat upright and looked through the door. In the examining room across the hall, the television tuned into a Spanish station. I tried to follow, having learned the language in the three years my family lived in Puerto Rico. The assistant came running into my room. “It fell down,” she cried. “One of the towers fell down.”

My hand flew to my mouth and I stood. I started to shake. In came the dentist.

I sat back down. The phone rang. It was the dentist’s wife.

“I’m not coming home,” he said into the phone. “I’m fine.”

His gloved finger entered my mouth again. At almost the same time, we spoke.

“I can’t do this.”

“I’m not going to the cleaning.”

“I have to go.”

“You’re too much on edge.”

I ripped the blue paper bib off, fished my reporter’s notebook out of my bag and ran out the door. I stopped shaking.

In Jackson Heights, the section of Queens I call home, the calm, tree-lined streets I’d walked minutes before were suddenly marked by chaos and confusion. Passersby puzzled over non-functional cellular phones. Lines at the pay phones were a half-dozen people deep. Commuters were turned away from subways. Passengers from nearby LaGuardia Airport bustled in. Parents brought children home from school and daycare early.

I interviewed all of them. Rather, as many as I could, in Spanish, English, some broken Hindi, and Bengali. Suddenly, it felt like every life skill I’d acquired, every story I’d ever worked on, converged.

There was Jimmy Van Bramer, a candidate for New York City Council, who kept campaigning, unaware that the primary scheduled for that day was about to be canceled.

There was Diana Goldberg, a social worker from Arkansas waiting to go home when her plane was abruptly disembarked.

“They were saying we should get as far away from the airport as possible,” she told me. “Maybe the airport will open in an hour.”

There was Lea Perera, a Brazilian immigrant here just two months, who held her son’s hand as she walked him home. With Spanish the only language we had in common, she told me how he kept asking her where the fire was. “I don’t know what to tell him.”

Then I entered a halal market, a shop selling meat slaughtered according to Islamic law.

It was still early and no one had assigned blame yet for the morning’s events. Nonetheless, the butcher braced himself. I saw shock he had when he saw my face, the same shade as his own, and said sadly: “I just hope this isn’t like 1993.”

That of course was the year terrorists exploded a bomb underneath the World Trade Center, failing to topple the towers but killing six people. My mind flashed back to my junior year of high school. It was the first year my best friend, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, was trying to cover her hair with hijab. She struggled with the decision, and it was not made easier by the fact that stereotypes of Muslims as fanatics and terrorists were being invoked. By senior year, my friend had abandoned the hijab.

I interviewed the butcher, who didn’t want to say much once he discovered I was a reporter. He planned to close his shop. He feared retaliation from the ignorant. He wanted his wife and children to stay indoors.

“Please don’t print my store name,” he begged. “I’m just trying to make a living.”

Across the street from the meat shop, a group of Muslims clustered around a street vendor with a radio. “It’s just like Oklahoma City all over again,” said one. “They’re going to blame us right away.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” said Nozmar Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant who hadn’t yet got his job at a hotel. “They haven’t done an investigation yet.”

Here was my story.

I hadn’t yet talked to an editor and my cell phone still wasn’t working, so I got in line at the pay phone, interviewing those waiting around me. On an earth-shattering story like this, reporters essentially feed their notes to a fellow reporter on the other end of the line. Luckily, I reached Katia, a fellow business reporter and close colleague at Newsday, read her the quotes I already had, and told her the story I planned to report.

“Is anyone already doing it?”

“Not like you will,” she said, then yelling decisively into the newsroom, “Mitra’s going to Muslim neighborhoods to get reaction.”

“Good idea,” I heard someone say.

*

Journalists of color, like myself, enter the newsroom knowing our jobs will always go beyond gathering the day’s news. We represent. We remind. Yes, we advocate.

In my case, my entry to journalism had everything to do with my skin color. It was 1993 and I was a sixteen-year-old with no career plans. Rider College was running a summer boot camp for minority youth in New Jersey who were interested in journalism. I needed something to occupy July since I couldn’t get my driver’s license until August. I applied and got in.

It was a cafeteria conversation a few days before school ended for the year that I felt the first of many uncomfortable moments as a minority journalist. We discussed our summer plans as high school juniors in suburbia—tennis camp, scholarships programs, jobs at the mall, stints as ice-cream scoopers.

“I’m doing a minority journalism workshop,” I said.

My redhead friend stopped before taking a bite of her rectangular pizza.

“Minority?”

“You qualify?”

I guess so.” Then more firmly, “Yeah, Indians are minorities.”

I left the lunch table early that day and went to the library. I tried to name an Indian—any Indian—who was a reporter. I couldn’t.

*

On September 11, subways had stopped running, and cabs were nearly impossible to hail. Jackson Heights houses the city’s largest shopping district for South Asians; Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis all work side by side. While interactions remain remarkably harmonious, occasional tensions do arise. I stayed in my neighborhood for a good part of that morning, talking to all groups about the potential repercussions. Many merchants shuttered their shops, mostly out of respect, but some out of fear.

“I hear they’re cheering on Atlantic Avenue,” accused one Indian immigrant, a Hindu, who works in a jewelry shop.

Atlantic Avenue runs through Brooklyn and boasts the city’s largest strip of Muslim retailers selling religious artifacts, books, scarves, and clothing. I knew my day’s reporting would eventually take me there. First, though, I headed toward Steinway Street in Astoria, a fledgling Arab neighborhood.

Once there, I stopped first at a Middle Eastern grocery and deli I’d been to before. Before I entered, a drunkard swaggered down the street.

“We need to get them,” he slurred.

I looked at him.

“What are you looking at?” he muttered, but I distinctly heard him say “Muslim” and “bitch.”

I rolled my eyes and walked inside. The cashier, a woman who wears hijab, had heard him too. So had a grad student who sat at the counter eating a meat pie. The owner, a mustachioed man who emigrated from Beirut, looked distressed.

“We are so sorry,” he said. “Are you OK?”

Before I could introduce myself as a reporter, the owner and his cashier had put me into a chair and handed me a just-warmed meat pie and a cup of tea.

“I’m fine,” I mustered in between bites and sips. “But I’m here to check on how you’re doing.”

And so went most of my interviews, filled with fear of what was to come and sadness for what had already happened. I made my way down Steinway Street, stopping at a travel agency, a mosque, Moroccan restaurants, and Egyptian cafés where smoke from cigars, cigarettes, and shisha pipes swirled.

“A lot of people are scared, but we have no time to grieve and cry like everybody else,” said Ali El Sayed, owner of the Kabab Café. “Because everybody’s categorizing us.”

By late afternoon, I knew it was time to get to Brooklyn, but cabs were even harder to hail.

Determined to keep interviewing, I approached a man on the corner. We started talking. His name was Faysal. He was from Algeria. He drove a limousine.

“How much you want to drive me around for the day?”

“You won’t be able to afford it,” he said, with more than a hint of desperation.

“One hundred bucks OK?” I asked.

We talked as he drove. I got my first update in hours from the car radio. I didn’t pause to think about my friends who worked downtown. I just kept interviewing. I didn’t stop to call my mother. I just kept asking questions.

As the car passed the Manhattan skyline, we grew silent. I stared at the plume of smoke. I turned away . . . toward Faysal to ask him another question.

*

The summer of the journalism workshop did more than jumpstart my career. At the impressionable age of sixteen, I discovered a job with a mission. I formed relationships with aspiring black, Latino, and Asian reporters as we talked late into the night about combating ignorance through education, interviewing minorities for more than stories about crime, holidays, and religious festivals. We threw around all the clichéd sayings I would be hearing for years to come. We wanted to cover communities from within. We wanted to give voice to the voiceless. We really meant it.

Indeed, it took being a reporter to discover my cultural identity.

Religion never played a big role in my home; my father is Buddhist, my mother Hindu. We lit incense, worshiped icons, and prayed at births, weddings, and deaths. As a child in Puerto Rico, I also remember going to Catholic church with my neighbors. My brother and I put our shoes out for gifts on Three Kings’ Day and took part in paranda, a ritual that mimics Joseph and Mary’s search for lodging. As a teenager in New Jersey, I attended so many bat and bar mitzvahs that I learned parts of the Torah. And my closest friend in high school was a Muslim Pakistani American, in spite of the warring homelands of our parents.

When it came to our rearing, my parents weren’t overbearing or strict like some families we knew. We had no curfew. We weren’t forced to take Indian dance, language, or religion classes. There were no expectations of arranged marriage. Instead, my parents chose subtle methods to ensure we had ties to their birthplace. At home, we speak Assamese, a northeastern Indian language. Bookcases fill every room, boasting the Bhagavad Gita and biographies on Gandhi. But there’s also black literature and the Bible, Khalil Gibran, and The Satanic Verses. I awake on weekend mornings to the strains of Indian music and the smells of curries and fried breads. When my mother also makes better parathas than samosas.

Every day as a reporter, I translate worlds, including my own. September 11 was no different.

*

On the way to Brooklyn, we passed hundreds of New Yorkers forced to leave Manhattan via bridges and tunnels. These were people whose knowledge of city geography was its subway map. For many, that transcended Manhattan’s borders.

I asked Faysal to stop at an ATM machine inside a gas station. There, I met two distressed-looking women who lived in Brooklyn, frantically calling their friends with cars to come get them.

“Forget it,” I said. “I can take you as far as Atlantic Avenue.”

Once we let them off, I called the office to “feed” once again. I would be working with our religion reporter on the Muslim story and was told to call her once I felt I had enough on Brooklyn.

The stores I hit on Atlantic Avenue voiced similar concerns to those in Jackson Heights and Astoria. But there is no Muslim monolith. To be sure, everyone denounced the attacks, but I encountered varying levels of patriotism and sympathy for the U.S. government. Some merchants had “Defend Palestine” slogans posted in their stores. Others had bumper stickers that warned, “Anyone who wishes to keep his dignity should give up disputation.” Another read: “The worst of provisions for the hereafter is aggression toward people.”

When I came upon a woman who wore hijab and a weary expression, I think I knew I had enough to call in the article.

“Today, people say ‘terrorist’ and they turn and look at me,” she said. “The ignorance that dwells within people’s minds, you cannot account for. I want to get out of here before nightfall.”

I called in my final feed and left before nightfall as well. It’s not that I was scared, but I felt an urge to be in the newsroom, see familiar faces, get a feel for the other aspects of this story.

On my way back to the office, my cell phone rang. I had forgotten it existed.

It was Aabir, a family friend I’d known since he was a toddler, calling from Washington, D.C. “Where are you?” he said. “My mother called me and said your mother called her and that she can’t get in touch with you.”

My mother.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I gotta go though. I’m in the middle of reporting.”

I dialed the number to my parents’ home. “Ma, it’s me. I’m fine.”

I could tell she’d been crying. For my sanity, I reminded a reporter, not her daughter.

“OK, I gotta go. I’m still working. Call everyone and tell them I’m fine.”

My cell phone now functional, I checked my messages—more than a dozen. I returned none.

Back at the office, I read the stories I had contributed to: stranded airport passengers, subway riders, closed businesses, and the city’s Muslims. I talked to colleagues about the stories they had been working on.

What to do now?

“Go home,” said the metro editor. “It’s almost midnight.”

*

It took a newspaper to make me cry.

On the subway to work on September 12, I read the coverage of what had happened. I started to shake. Then I came to these words, an e-mail sent from a worker in the World Trade Center after the first plane crashed: “I don’t think I’m going to get out. You’ve been a really good friend.”

Alone on the subway, I sobbed.

A guy paused to look up at a man seated near me. Despite tears in his eyes, he said nothing. I looked around the subway car and saw that everyone else’s eyes were filled with tears or blank stares. It was silent.

And that’s how the next few days stayed. Silent. Sorrowful. Sure. Those of us in the newsroom remained on virtual autopilot, scrambling to keep up with the barrage of breaking news. I felt conflicting loyalties. I wanted to continue covering the backlash. But early in my career, I set rules. To avoid being pigeonholed, I paired articles about South Asians with articles about other immigrant groups or subjects. As a business reporter, I had a carved a beat out of the city’s moms and pops, just as likely to be called Ma and Baba, Ami and Abu, Ima and Aba. I also was responsible for some airlines coverage, namely the businesses dependent on them for survival. They included taxi and limo drivers, parking garages, and cargo handlers—industries heavily dependent on immigrant workers. And I knew the World Trade Center’s death toll included many Bangladeshi dishwashers and cooks and waiters at Windows on the World. Would their obituaries be forgotten among the bond traders and bankers?

Everyone was suffering. The question was where to begin. My editor, accustomed to helping young reporters prioritize, advised me to take it one story at a time.

On the Thursday after the attacks, I ventured into the area immediately surrounding the World Trade Center for an article that would end up being about a deli—owned by a Muslim—where all the rescue workers had been eating.

I’ve never seen a war zone, but I imagined a place much close. An acrid smell of smoke and dust and devastation in the air mixed with the salty smell of the nearby South Street Seaport. Parked cars covered in dust and soot. Pedestrians walked around with masks, tissues or T-shirts covering the lower halves of their faces. Again, I turned to interviewing to avoid facing it.

After my interviews, I headed north to catch the subway home. Curious about what the disaster area actually looked like, I took an inside route.

As I approached Ground Zero, I craned my neck to see where the twin buildings had once towered and only saw smoke. I heard a shout: “Everyone, get down!” National Guardsmen in green camouflage uniforms started to run, joined by police officers. Then I saw people who looked like me, civilians, running but turning back to look occasionally at where we were running from. Apparently the Millennium Hotel, next to where the Twin Towers had stood, had shifted.

I looked down at my notebook, still in my hand. I searched inside my handbag for my cellular phone. Should I call my editor? My parents, to say good-bye? Would I be OK? When you run from a building, you wonder where to turn, inside another building or far, far away. You wonder if it’ll hurt when it lands. You wonder if someone will find you.

I ran. Once safely on Manhattan’s East Side, I started to interview people.

*

Perhaps it was the only way a reporter could deal with tragedy, as a new event. Don’t get me wrong: I tried to humanize and empathize. I patted arms when people cried. I gave directions and even rides to the stranded. I lent quarters for phone calls.

But the stories seemed to be endless. Everyone in this city has a story to tell.

I’ve talked to business owners who’ve lost everything, to Wall Street analysts too traumatized to work, to superintendents taking care of those whose owners never returned home. Their stories will never take years of telling; it’s more than I can ever write in a single lifetime, but I can try.

On the Friday night after the attacks, while out surveying the city’s subdued social scene, a woman I was interviewing suddenly turned to me and said: “I hope you don’t mind me asking. How are you doing?”

I didn’t know what to tell her.

That sleepless night, I pondered her question. It was the first time someone had turned the questioning on me. I had successfully been avoiding friends and family, saying I was too busy reporting to talk.

I was scared. I was angry. At the terrorists, yes, but also those who perpetuated ignorance and questioned some of their fellow Americans’ intentions. After September 11, I confess I cringed at the sight of an American flag because I never knew if its display was motivated by patriotism or fear.

Sometimes, I dream of life before September 11, 2001. I thought I was too fat. I wondered who would marry me. I honked at slow cars on the highway.

Slowly, those trivial feelings are returning. Still, it will never be the same. Even now, the enormity of that day hasn’t quite sunk in. The search for meaning in all of this is much too much to bear.

So I pick up my notebook and keep going.