Everyone talks about the sky on 9/11 — how big and blue and perfect it was, only to be filled with smoke and terror. We remember the enormity of the day: the towers, the fire, the flyers of the missing, the long lists of names.
I think we do a disservice by focusing only on scale.
What I remember most are the little things. I list them now so as to, as the saying goes, never forget.
I had a dentist appointment. The hygienist turned on Univision, and we both gasped as the towers fell. I stayed in touch with her for years afterward, as she — and I — traveled from one retiring dentist to another across Jackson Heights.
The most beautiful baby I ever saw in my life was born on Sept. 13, 2001. His father, Mohammad Chowdhury, had been a banquet waiter at Windows on the World. He was working a morning shift to earn money before a planned caesarean section when he perished. Two days later, his wife, Baraheen Ashrafi, gave birth to Farqad — “brilliant star.” I interviewed the family in their Woodside home and blinked back tears as I saw this perfect human who had emerged in such awful circumstances.
I remember crying at least twice more: once on the subway the morning after, as I read The New York Times quoting a final email: “I don’t think I’m going to get out. You’ve been a really good friend.” More sobs that Saturday, after I had worked nonstop and a friend staged an intervention. He would make me take a break, eat Indian food and spend the night watching bad sitcoms with him and his wife.
I remember Muslims in Queens immediately closing shops, collecting their children and moving indoors. I lived in a building of Pakistanis across Travers Park, and they included me in their safety net of meals, calls and check-ins. In the first hours after the attacks, they knew what much of the country would soon make painfully clear: their grief would be treated as suspect, their traditions as evidence, their loyalty tested over and over.
I lost four acquaintances: a high school classmate, a college classmate, a family friend, my math instructor from SAT prep.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I had a date to interview Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. But, me being a New Yorker, and me being me, I had big plans for the hours before then — some that had been assigned, some aspirational.
The plan was simple: start with the dentist appointment, interview voters in New York’s special election, then the Millennium Hotel downtown, where I was meeting Khan. The night before, he had shut down streets in Jackson Heights for the release of the soundtrack to “Asoka.” The NYPD was spectacularly unprepared for thousands of desis trying to glimpse — or touch — the icon. I felt smug that I had warned my editors and secured my interview long before.
As we all know, none of the day went according to plan.
I was a young business reporter at Newsday. As smoke rose over Lower Manhattan, my editor told me to get as close to the World Trade Center as possible. But as I walked through my own neighborhood literal minutes after the attacks, I found frightened neighbors and businesses shuttering. I bucked orders and stayed local: Jackson Heights and Astoria. Yet also global: By the time I got to the cluster of Arab-owned businesses on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that evening, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were already named and blamed.
In a chapter I later wrote for “At Ground Zero: 25 Stories from Young Reporters Who Were There,” I described the small acts of care that met me amid terror: the woman in hijab who pulled me in after a stranger called me a Muslim and a bitch; the Arab grocery owner who put me in a chair and handed me a warm meat pie and tea; the Algerian livery-cab driver who stayed with me the whole day, even as he worried about his own safety.
“Everyone was suffering,” I wrote then. “The question was where to begin.”
I have written about Sept. 11 on many anniversaries since. I don’t love it but I know why we must. I’ve reported, edited and built newsrooms around immigration, work, housing, public health, racial inequity and the changing future of media.
The question that began that Tuesday 25 years ago has stayed with me: Who is missing from the official account? How to humanize a statistic, a mug shot, a data point or a political talking point?
After 9/11, I wrote that there was only one way to cope: “I pick up my notebook and keep going.”
That remains the job.
It is not simply to cover a community when it is under attack. It is to cover that community fully before, during and after a crisis. It is to understand that the people who make this city run — taxi drivers and banquet waiters, their newborn children and awkward teens — are as much the story of New York as our iconic skyline.
The backlash in the immediate aftermath portended a broader, deeper overhaul of society, as passage of bills such as the Patriot Act led to the establishment of new security norms.
It feels like we are worse off now. As Felipe De La Hoz writes, the bigotry that has always been with us has become more organized, and more comfortable in public. The politics of fear divide us, but they also, oddly, unite us: anti-Muslim policies eventually ensnared Black and brown communities via stop-and-frisk, while homeland security became weaponized against all immigrants.
A few years ago, I described to a colleague what it was like to be a young reporter on 9/11: “We thought there’d never be another story we cover. It felt like this day would basically define the rest of my career.”
My colleague replied: “Well, hasn’t it?”
I realized she was right. I once thought I was covering the aftermath of a single event. Instead, I was learning how the rest of my career would unfold: in the space between the official story and the lived experience on the ground, between what institutions say and what communities know.
But there is one reality I cling to after decades of coverage. It’s one that took me some time to assert as fact: This is our city.
The attacks changed the course of our lives. They changed mine. They formed my journalism, my understanding of community and my conviction that information is power. Six years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing racial-justice protests only bolstered that mission. Once again, scale would not save us; neighbors looked inward for solutions and built networks of care. I found myself shifting tack from the need to humanize stories and policies to questioning why some facets of society are dehumanized in the first place. I firmly believe those moral questions and grassroots efforts across the city’s neighborhoods helped pave the way for our current mayor’s resounding victory.
Indeed, the city where Muslim and South Asian residents became targets of suspicion now has a Muslim, South Asian mayor. He once represented the very same area I reported from on 9/11, one I described as a “fledgling Arab neighborhood” back then. His ascension is not a tidy, happy ending, nor does it erase the city’s deep dysfunctions. If anything, the rhetoric over whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani should be “allowed” at the 9/11 ceremony is emblematic of just how far we have fallen.
For brown New Yorkers, too, grieve these attacks — perhaps doubly so, because they also stole our sense of safety and belonging in a different way than our white neighbors. We not only mourned the city, people and skyline we lost – then many of us were asked to prove our right to belong.
But New York has not merely survived. Its diverse, immigrant, multilingual democracy has deepened and persisted. As I often say about Queens, we represent a way of life— and that is precisely why we are (still) under attack.
We defend this way, our very existence, our precarious harmony that forms the bedrock of a multiracial democracy. Despite terrorist attacks, pandemics and ICE raids, New York will never die because New Yorkers keep refusing to disappear. Communities like mine, defined by geography, identity, language and so much more, keep showing up for one another: with food, phone calls, reporting, organizing, art, prayer, work and the stubborn belief that there must be room for all of us and our stories.
And so 25 years later, I still pick up my notebook and keep going.
