Expressway: My personal memory of the 9/11 tragedy

I have a superstition that the Grim Reaper likes to compete with the birthday gods. My father died on Dec. 25, 2010, his 82nd birthday. Actress Ingrid Bergman and inventor George Washington Carver also died on their birthdays.

My silly notion must have sprung from the fact that when I was about 14 years old in India, a classmate warned me, "If anyone asks you your age on your birthday, don't tell them because it will shorten your life."

On Sept. 10, 2001, in keeping with our daily practice, my husband, Bala, and I went for a stroll on the Long Beach boardwalk. That evening, the weather put on an ominous show. A picture perfect evening turned stormy. Dramatic lightning strikes, like scratches on a mirror, came in quick succession. A sunny evening almost instantly got enveloped in grey like a Broadway production set change.

I love unusual weather and normally, I would have continued walking, but Sept. 10 was a day before my husband's birthday and, in fact, in India, where he was born, it was already Sept. 11. The change in the weather felt spooky and so I told my husband that we must return home.

The next day, Sept. 11, brought us perfect weather. Yet, this was a day most of us wish the calendar had skipped. We still feel the pain the terrorists flung at America on that day.

The next day, I found out that a dear friend and her husband in New York City, like thousands of others, had lost a family member. Their firstborn son, an employee at a financial firm, died in the North Tower at the World Trade Center. From the front of her residential building at New York University in Greenwich Village, where she worked, my friend watched the towers cascade into ashen heaps.

The following week, I went to see her and her husband. Stoic by nature, she just said, "What can one do?"

She had experienced loss before. When she was just 14, her father, an official at the United Nations, succumbed to a heart attack and died. Her family learned about this tragedy from the TV news.

The evening of Sept. 12, my husband and I went back to the boardwalk, but we encountered strange looks and tentative hellos from passersby. My husband's prominent nose and beard might have marked him as an Arab.

Years earlier, mistaken for Middle Easterners, we had received a phone threat from a caller who said he was from the Jewish Defense League. The man said the house we were buying in Oceanside would be burned down if we moved in. We did not relent.

And so, on Sept. 13, my husband removed his beard, which he had grown to please me. Within a week, a bearded Indian Sikh with a turban was shot to death in Arizona because the killer thought he was a Muslim and the murderer hated all Muslims.

Many Americans voiced the opinion that this was not the way to settle the score with the terrorists who had shattered our peace forever on that fateful day.

When we saw the towers tumble, to some of us it seemed like a scene from a movie. I wish it had been, but the Grim Reaper had visited us swinging far and wide a sickle that killed thousands.

Reader Rohini B. Ramanathan, a consultant, writer and musician, lives in Oceanside.

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