9-11 contemplation...

It's been eight years since the 9/11 attacks, a day when I full realized that my heart considered this land to be home much more than the land I was born in. If you ask any immigrant a simple question on how often they go home or when was the last time they visited home or where was their home, the home in the answer is always the land that they were born in. Even if they have had decades more on this soil than their birth country!

I have gone 'home' very infrequently and after long gaps, but there is always an instant sense of belonging and the sinking into the familiar, akin to receiving a warm hug from my mother or grandmother. I would go through a similar, but far less intense feeling of being back to where I belong when I re-entered the US, but it was always relegated to tug of the US home to the fact that this was where my small physical footprint (house & belongings), and friends and the job that sustained me were.

The morning of 9/11, as I watched the attacks in horror and pain for the ones who obviously had not made it, a host of other emotions surfaced. One of them was a familiar feeling of insecurity that comes from your land being under attack and it brought me back to the last time I had felt that way.

It was in the winter of 1971 when India was at war with Pakistan. My hometown (about 100 miles from the Pakistan border) was in a direct line of one of their prime targets, the Bhakra dam. If they destroyed the dam, the flood waters would have destroyed my home town and many others. We lived through evenings of dimmed headlights on cars, thick layers of newspapers on our windows and frequently participated in kid patrols of the neighborhood to make sure none of the houses had light seeping out of the windows. We lived through the frequent warning sirens, which had us running to the nearest shelter, where we crouched with our arms over our heads until the clear siren would tell us it was safe to come out again.

9-11- 2001, in my adopted land, so many years later, as the twin towers collapsed, followed by the attack on the Pentagon, memories and images of those days of war in the winter of 1971, of that one night when I saw and heard planes and bullets in the sky, came rushing back, along with this new feeling of being of vulnerable as a nation. This was not something I associated with living in the US, wars and attacks from foreign nations or terrorists happened to other countries.

The anger and a thirst for retaliation to make the perpetrators pay for what they were doing, was visceral, it came from the gut. In the days that followed, I had a more than a few moments of self realization - one of them that I can never forget - this country was undeniably home!

As we go through today doing what we normally do, go to work; learn some new things and perform our job duties, I will try and remember and send a prayer for those who lost loved ones and had their lives changed forever on this dark day in our history eight years ago.