Opinion: 25 Years After 9/11, I Know I’m Different And I Like It

India-West News Desk

Twenty-five years ago, the September 11th attacks changed the course of the country and our communities were hit twice. First, by the shared grief of September 11: the families who lost loved ones, the responders who ran toward danger, a country changed overnight. Then by everything that followed, when being Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or simply South Asian made you a suspect in your own country, notes Indian American Impact. 

Sarah Batchu a noted non-profit leader, public servant who has run for office in New York and health activist wrote about this in the PAC’s forum:

I was different growing up, but I never knew it. Dad was Indian, mom was Jewish. They married after looking hard for a rabbi who would perform an interfaith wedding. They raised us in a white, Christian suburb, yet I always assumed we were like everyone else.

September 11th changed that. That Tuesday, when the afterschool bus pulled up, I sashayed to the front row. Michael, a freckle-faced bully, snickered loudly from the back.

“Why are you laughing?” I called. Did I have something on my new blue overalls?

“You didn’t hear? Some planes went into buildings,” he shouted.

I tilted my head. His individual words were clear, yet when he strung them together, they didn’t make any sense. At least not to my 7-year-old mind.

In the days that followed, I pieced it together. I was too young to understand geopolitics, but I understood the blame game.

That December, we took our annual family trip to India because my dad insisted “we were all becoming too American.”

We connected through the Frankfurt airport, where my sister Rachael wrapped my hand in hers as we made our way toward security. The airport, which always looked both sterile and like someone had sprayed a mustard bottle all over it, was dead.

Yet, when my stepmom crossed the metal detector threshold, followed by my dad, plastic-gloved men surrounded him. Me and my sisters were escorted aside.

As my pink backpack was unzipped, and my days of week underwear exposed, my jaw dropped in horror. In the span of one minute, I transformed from a child to a threat.

“Entwarnung,” a gloved man said, handing the backpack over to my father.

Soon after, at a family wedding, a boy I had developed a crush on turned to me as we jumped up and down on the dancefloor, “Your dad kind of looks like a terrorist.”

The wind was knocked out of me. The world slowed down. He laughed and hopped away.

But the pain stayed with me. For years after, everywhere from the gas station to the supermarket had a “God Bless America” sign. And I thought, why had God blessed America and not me?

I straightened my hair. I told my dad not to pick me up from school. I begged my mom for laser hair removal. If being different made me a threat, maybe being less different would make me safe.

But the more I tried to erase my difference, the more I missed it.

When I moved to New York for college, I found the Lower East Side—a neighborhood that carried the complexity I grew up with: people from different backgrounds, all sharing space. Difference didn’t feel like something I had to hide here. It felt like something that could bring people together.

I fell for this neighborhood hard and fast, running for office with the support of Indian American Impact.

Twenty-five years later, I know I am different, but that’s the way I like it.