Amitava Kumar remembers 9/11: 'It was as if I arrived drunk at a funeral'

I was asleep when the planes hit the towers. A phone call from an editor in India woke me up. Actually, my wife had picked the phone and I sprang awake when I heard her sobbing. Her brother worked in a building close to the World Trade Center. I was asked to write 800 words. During the rest of the day, there were other requests from editors. I spent the day writing. I kept going back to my memory of the day Indira Gandhi was killed. I had been a student in Delhi at that time, and had lived through the horrible massacre of Sikhs. I kept fearing that there would be violence, that Arabs or Arab-looking people would be pulled from their homes and killed. Of course, that didn’t happen. And the bombs were not to fall over Afghanistan and Iraq till many weeks later. The first piece I wrote on September 11 contained some angry words for the US, at its neglect for what the rest of the world thought of it. Later, I read Amitav Ghosh’s sweet, sad elegy in the New Yorker Magazine, and I felt a bit abashed about the angry piece I had written. It was as if I had arrived drunk at a funeral. [caption id=“attachment_81101” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Amitava Kumar teaches at Vassar College and is a well-known author Photo: Neeraj Piyadarshi”]  [/caption] Of course, my views have changed, not least because the world has changed. Nearly each year I have taught a course called “Literature of 9/11.” I have also written a book about the human cost of the global war on terror which, to put it bluntly, has been a monumental tragedy. A character in David Hare’s play “Stuff Happens” says at one point, “On September 11th, America changed. Yes. It got much stupider.” As told to Uttara Choudhury Amitava Kumar is the author of several books, including “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb.” He teaches at Vassar College in upstate New York.