Homeless after 9/11.

AuthorNajmi, Samina
PositionFIRST PERSON SINGULAR

"MAMA," SAYS MY ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, MAYA, one evening in May last year. "Some kids in my class asked me if my family had helped to hide Osama bin Laden."

Hmmmm.

I'm from Pakistan, and my parents still live there--not way up north among the mountains in Abbottabad, where bin Laden has just been killed, but way down south by the balmy Indian Ocean, in Karachi. Playing host to Osama bin Laden--really?

Maya was a toddler when the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened. She had learned to walk in Taunton, Massachusetts, barely three months earlier.

I mourned the deaths and destruction at Ground Zero while she rummaged through the kitchen cupboards and built Tupperware towers. Then I mourned the backlash against people of Muslim background like me, while she closed her dark, pondering eyes to lullabies my grandmother once sang to me in Urdu.

My own childhood was split between Pakistan and England, but when I settled in Taunton, I thought I finally belonged in America. Then the 9/11 backlash rendered me homeless.

And while we razed Afghanistan--the country next door to my parents, the country whose battered population had resurfaced after a brutal Soviet occupation and a bitter civil war to find itself in the harsh grip of the Taliban--I was about to bring an American boy into the world.

Cyrus was born five months after 9/11, when Maya was twenty-one-months old. He learned to roll over on the rug, then crawl, and speak his first words as the official rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction gathered momentum. The week Cyrus took his first independent steps in Taunton, we invaded Iraq.

By August of that year, I bowed out of adjunct teaching as an English professor, scooped up my two young children, and left for Pakistan. I don't know what I sought there. But when the road ahead of you vanishes, you retrace your footsteps to where you began. I knew only that I wanted my children to live, for a time, near their grandparents and a web of other relatives and friends. And perhaps I hoped Maya and Cyrus would begin to spout words in Urdu just from being among them.

Five months later, we returned to Taunton, where my husband, Alex, had been waiting for us with quiet patience. I trusted the American Constitution in a way that I couldn't trust governments or public opinion anywhere. Even if we warred with two Muslim countries simultaneously, I believed America would give me the space to raise my children as I wished: as secular...

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