The anxiety of 9/11 in my fiction: Manil Suri remembers 9/11

By Manil Suri My partner called me from his office and asked if I’d seen the news. He told me a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I turned on the television and there it was: the tower in flames. The newscasters still didn’t know if it was an accident or a terrorist attack. I had to tear myself away from the screen because my car was due at the garage for repairs. They didn’t have a television at the garage, so the transaction was quite normal. I gave them my keys, told them I’d come back in the afternoon to pick the car up, and started walking back home. Three blocks from my house, a woman came up to me, all excited. “They’ve just bombed the Pentagon,” she said. “Who knows whom they’ll hit next?” [caption id=“attachment_81966” align=“alignleft” width=“250” caption=“Manil Suri”] [/caption] I sprinted back home, perhaps afraid of my own safety, even though the Pentagon is almost twelve miles from where we live. By now, two towers burned on the television screen, interspersed with a smoking Pentagon. I called my parents in India to assure them we were safe. “Planes weren’t meant to disappear into buildings,” my father said. Perhaps what I remember most clearly from that day and the ones that followed is how preternaturally clear the sky was. A pure September blue, one free of even the slightest wisp of cloud. The only planes that flew for some time were military jets – dozens of them, zooming over Washington, DC and its suburbs. Every time we heard them, we wondered if the terrorists had returned. That eleventh day of September demonstrated how vulnerable we are. It created a sense of insecurity that has slowly hardened over the past decade, become a part of many of us. For me, personally, this anxiety has manifested itself in my fiction. In September 2000, I wrote a scene in which I imagined us all on the verge of destruction. In those relatively optimistic times, one perhaps encountered such notions mainly in fiction. This month, I completed the first draft of The City of Devi, the novel that arose from that beginning. In the ensuing 11 years, the unlikely scenario I imagined has moved into the realm of the possible. The instability generated by 9/11 (and by the ensuing retaliation) has taken root, perhaps most dangerously in nuclear-armed Pakistan. We can no longer take our survival for granted, assume we will not witness the end of the world. Manil Suri ’s most recent novel is The Age of Shiva_. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. I__n addition to being a writer, Suri is s a tenured full professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County._