My Sister who lives in California called me on the evening of 11 September. She was agitated, and told me what someone in her workplace was saying: "My friend says we should kill all the brown people." She was aghast especially when another co-worker asked her, "Why are you looking so sad?" A devout Buddhist, my sister abhors violence of any kind, and was devastated by the tragedy in New York and Washington. And yet, her skin seared the imagination of those who see her each day; one day, suddenly, she became a terrorist.
And so did all of us. This is not a new feeling. When I first got to the US, in the early 1980s, someone had called me a "sand nigger". Illiterate in the ways of racism I was puzzled like many immigrants, and had to ask a friend what to make of the insult. The context they was Gaddafi, and I chanced to have his hairstyle and even look a bit like him. All that reappeared during the Gulf War, as many desis who looked like Palestinians and Iraqis found themselves followed by men in dark suits. For the first few days after the 1995 destruction, of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, I was, made to feel like a terrorist again. And when I got wore of the WTC devastation, I prayed in my own atheistic way that the perpetrator was not an Arab, or someone like me. They were, and I'm a terrorist again.
And so was Balbir Singh Sodhi, 49, shot in Mesa (Arizona) by a man who said to the police, "I stand for America all the way." And so was Waqar Hassan, 46, of Dallas (Texas), slain in cold blood while working at Mom's Grocery. And Ashraf Khan, another Pakistani- Texan, and a cell phone magnate, was removed from his first class seat by a Delta pilot who said that Khan was a threat to the plane. And there have been the mosques, gurudwaras and temples firebombed and desecrated, even as those who look like terrorists find their homes under threat from the forces of jingoism and xeno-racism. Many desis and Arabs refuse to leave their homes, scared to walk in the open in the "land of the free".
The Indian Embassy in Washington had the bad taste to try to suggest ways to camouflage us from the real terrorists. Women should sport bindis, a consular official wrote in a publicly circulated document. And the men ought to smear themselves with bindis too, said a friend in jest. In the mid-1980s, the bindi provided a set of racists with a name for their anti-desi organisation, the Dotbusters. Now the Indian diplomats, without any sense of irony, urge us to wear the dots as protection. And for Sikhs, the nightmare of the turban as a sign of difference reminds them and all of us of the horror of the 1984 Delhi riots. Turbans, bindis, kurtas, Is kirpans—all these signs of difference only enhance our skin tones, our features, and confirm our terrorist status.