The Good-Immigrant Bargain Never Worked: Reflections On What Became of Indian Americans Since 9/11

Somewhere in New York this week, a family is quietly not celebrating a birthday.

Anish Shrivastava was born in the city on the morning of September 11, 2001. His uncle Manish worked at the World Trade Center and skipped work that day to be at the hospital. The birth, in other words, is the reason the uncle is alive, and the family has spent a quarter century holding those two facts in the same hand. When a reporter caught up with Anish for the twenty-first anniversary, he was studying engineering, had thrown himself into service work, and described the coincidence less as luck than as an assignment. The family still waits a few days before cutting the cake.

He turns twenty-five on Friday. So does everyone born that week. They are, at this point, an entire cohort of adults: old enough to have finished school, started careers, married, had children of their own. They have never boarded a plane with their shoes on. They have never lived in a United States that was not at war somewhere, under some authorization, against someone. They have carried a device that reports their location since before they could read, and it has never once occurred to them that this is strange. 

The art historian Kirk Varnedoe said at the time that the country could choose to treat what had happened as an injury — terrible, specific, survivable — or as imagery, a loop of fire replayed until you lived inside it. The country chose imagery. These are the first people raised entirely inside the loop, with no memory of the wound.

That is not a complaint about them. It is a question for the rest of us. What exactly did we build, that first week? And who paid for it?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at a client site in Delavan, Wisconsin, a small town between Milwaukee and the Illinois line, doing the kind of consulting work that involved living in a hotel four nights a week and flying home on Thursdays. Someone said a plane had hit a building in New York. Then someone said a second one had. Then no one said anything for a long time.

There was no procedure for it. Nobody sent us home; nobody told us to stay. We simply dispersed, slowly, the way a crowd leaves a stadium after a game that has been called off, each of us with the vague sense that we should be somewhere else without knowing where. I drove to the hotel and sat in front of the television until the pictures stopped being news and became wallpaper.

The flights were canceled, of course. All of them. I did not bother driving to Milwaukee. The next morning, I got into a rental car with Wisconsin plates and started driving east toward Novi, Michigan, where my family was.

It is a seven-hour drive on a normal day, down through Chicago’s suburbs, across the top of Indiana, and up into Michigan on I-94. On September 12, 2001, it was something else. The sky was empty. Not quiet — empty. Every commercial aircraft in the country was on the ground, and it turns out that the sky over the industrial Midwest is normally full of contrails you never notice until they are gone. The radio ran the same loop of facts and speculation for seven hours, and somewhere around Gary, Indiana, the tone of the speculation started to change. The day before, the voices had been grieving. By the time I crossed into Michigan, they wanted to know who was going to pay.

I was a brown man, alone, in a car with out-of-state plates, buying gas at rest stops in Indiana on the day the country began to look carefully at people who looked like me. I would like to tell you that I noticed the looks, or that I did not, but the truth is that I do not remember. What I remember is the sky and the radio and the road, and the specific unease of not knowing what I was driving toward.

I got to Novi after dark. I don’t remember what I said when I walked in, or whether anyone said anything. I remember that the house was the same, and that this seemed, for a moment, impossible.

I was on an H-1B visa. My green card application had been filed and was sitting in a queue whose length nobody could tell me. I mention this because it matters to everything that follows. A citizen who felt afraid that week had options, including the option of saying so. Someone whose standing in the country was a piece of paper with someone else’s signature pending had a narrower set. You did not make noise. You did not draw attention. You went to work, and you were grateful, and you let the gratitude be visible.

Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker this week, describes terrorism as a kind of autoimmune disease: it works by getting the body to attack itself while believing it is defending itself. He is right, and he leaves out one step. An immune system has to be told which cells are foreign. In the fall of 2001, it got help.

In the weeks after the attacks, a quiet sorting took place across brown America, and Indian Americans, Hindus in particular, were among the most energetic sorters. We were not them. We were engineers and doctors and motel owners. We were the good immigrants, the ones who came through the front door with degrees, the ones who had never given anyone trouble. Some of us said it out loud. More of us said it with a flag in the window and a careful, well-timed silence. The Pakistani American writer Wajahat Ali, then a student at Berkeley, remembers other South Asians rushing to clarify that they were Hindu, not Muslim — and remembers that it made no difference at all, because nobody doing the hating was checking.

The deportation politics that once seemed to be about other people’s borders have a way of arriving, eventually, at every brown door, and the knock does not pause to ask what you believe.

I do not remember making that distinction myself. I have searched for the memory honestly and it is not there. I also do not remember refusing to make it, or objecting when someone else did, and at twenty-five years’ distance I am not sure the two absences are as different as I would like them to be. The sorting did not require anyone to sign anything. It only required that, when the country was deciding whom to be afraid of, we did not volunteer.

When We Didn’t Protest

And the sorting worked — for us. It worked so well that most of us never noticed the government doing the same thing, on our behalf, with the force of law. When the Justice Department launched its special registration program the following year, requiring men from a list of twenty-five countries to report, be fingerprinted, and be interrogated, the list included Pakistan and Bangladesh. It did not include India. Brown men who prayed in one direction were called in; brown men who looked exactly like them and prayed in another were not. Nobody in Novi, as far as I know, wrote a letter of protest. Why would we? It was not us.

Not all of us were on the sorting side of the ledger. Some of us were in the buildings, and one was on the first plane. Vamsikrishna Pendyala was two batches ahead of me at BITS Pilani, a thirty-year-old software engineer who took his supervisor’s seat on an earlier flight out of Boston that morning. American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46. Somewhere there is a man who was supposed to be on that plane, and who has spent twenty-five years being alive in someone else’s seat. I do not know what that is like. I know that the seat was offered as a favor, the way we all did favors for each other then, the way you would for anyone from the same campus, and that the favor is what killed him. His death is the reason my alumni association exists in its present form; a scattered network of BITSians incorporated in the months afterward largely because of him, and there is a scholarship at Pilani with his name on it.

In Manhattan that month, the walls filled with homemade posters of the missing. Some carried a small note to help with identification: a tattoo, a medal, and on at least one, that the man pictured had no beard that day. A family was trying to make sure their missing person would not be overlooked for looking different from his photograph, in a city where beards were, that same week, becoming evidence.

It was, however, the Sikhs.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, while the towers were still enveloped in smoke and the rest of us were still watching television, an elderly Sikh man and two teenagers were beaten in New York City. That same night, a group of Sikh New Yorkers gathered and founded what became the Sikh Coalition. They did not wait to see whether the backlash would come. They had been in America long enough to know that a turban and a beard would be enough, and they organized before the first body dropped.

The first body dropped four days later. Balbir Singh Sodhi was planting flowers outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, when a man who later described himself as a patriot shot him dead. Sodhi was not Muslim. He was not Arab. He was a Sikh from Punjab who wore the turban his faith requires, and he was killed for being visible on a week when the rest of us were working very hard not to be.

The sort was not only wrong about the people it targeted. It was wrong about the one it was surest of. Salman Hamdani was a twenty-three-year-old Pakistani American, an emergency medical technician and police cadet from Queens, who ran toward the towers on the morning of the 11th and did not come home. In the weeks that followed, while his mother went from hospital to hospital with his photograph, asking strangers if they had seen her son, a flyer went around saying he was wanted by the terrorist task force, and a newspaper asked whether he was missing or hiding. His body was eventually found in the North Tower. At the memorial downtown his name is not with the first responders. It sits on the last panel, beside a blank space, in the section reserved for people with no clear connection to the buildings. The sorting looked at a man who died trying to save strangers, decided he was them, and carved the decision in bronze. His mother still goes to the memorial. She has to walk past the firefighters to reach him.

Consider what the Sikhs had to gain from the sorting. Of everyone in brown America, they had the most to lose from being mistaken and the easiest case to make: we are not Muslim, our faith was born in resistance to the Mughals, we have been misidentified for a century. They could have spent the next twenty-five years saying so. Instead, the organization founded that night spent them defending everyone — Muslims, Arabs, Hindus, the people who had quietly stepped away from them at the airport. In the first month after the attacks, the Coalition documented more than three hundred cases of violence and discrimination against Sikhs alone. Hate crimes against Muslims, by the FBI’s own count, rose more than 16 fold that year. The people at the bottom of the sort took the blows for the people at the top, and then built the institutions that protected us all.

That is the moral center of the story, and I did not find it. I drove past it, on I-94, at seventy miles an hour.

The Good-Immigrant Bargain

Twenty-five years later, the bill has come due, and it turns out we were the cosigners.

The good-immigrant bargain was never a purchase. It was a loan, extended on terms nobody read, and the terms have now been called. The community that spent 2001 explaining that it was not the problem is spending 2026 discovering that “the problem” was always a category with room to grow. The birthright citizenship fight is aimed at our children. The H-1B hostility is aimed at the visa I was on that morning in Delavan. The deportation politics that once seemed to be about other people’s borders have a way of arriving, eventually, at every brown door, and the knock does not pause to ask what you believe.

And the people answering the door are the twenty-five-year-olds. They were born into a country already sorted and have no memory of the sorting. They inherited the empty sky, the surveillance, the airport, the permanent low-grade war, and the fine print of their parents’ silence, and they are being handed the invoice without ever having seen the loan. They cannot understand why they are suspected, because they were not there when we agreed to the terms.

They will have to figure it out anyway. That is what inheritance means.

Anish Shrivastava’s family will celebrate his birthday this weekend, a few days late, as they have every year of his life. It is a small, private act of deference to a day that belongs to too many other people. I find I admire it more each year: the refusal to pretend the coincidence away, and the refusal to let it swallow the boy. Somewhere in that family there is a photograph of a newborn taken on the morning of September 11, 2001, in a city that was burning a few miles away, and an uncle in the frame who should have been at his desk. That is the whole country in one picture: the thing that saved you and the thing that took everyone else, born the same hour, held in the same hand.

Twenty-five years ago, a man who looked like me drove home across an empty Midwest, grateful and afraid and mostly silent, and did not think very hard about who was paying for his passage. The least I can do now, on the anniversary, is say out loud what I did not say then.

We were not them.

But “them” was never a religion; it was a color, and we had it. We were never going to be allowed to be us.

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Ganpy Nataraj is an entrepreneur, author of “TEXIT – A Star Alone” (thriller) and short stories. He is a moody writer writing “stuff” —  Politics, Movies,  Music, Sports, Satire, Food, etc.