We all have our days of reckoning: the day we are born, the day we realize who we are. For Dr. Navinder Nijher, it took two days for the latter. Unlike me and my friends, who remember 9/11 through the TV images, through our interactions with our distant locales, Dr. Nijher was on ground zero. Securing in body bags, his team collected torsos, arms of people who had jumped off the skyscrapers. To save a life from debris, they made life and death decisions like whether to chop a limb or wait for equipment. Stationed in the American Express Center with oxygen tanks and other supplies, they watched and worried about additional structures collapsing. Dr. Nijher had seen trauma before, such as gunshots. “But those victims still had their skin tone. Here, everyone was the same color.” Ashy. A weeping firefighter handed them his friend’s body in a bag and lunged back into the smoke. He refused their care, focused on helping others. Dr. Nijher never saw him again.
That day, he was a doctor, a hero in scrubs, a colorless physician volunteer, who hitched a midnight ride via a boat to his hospital in Brooklyn, not home. Another on-call day later, he reached home past one in the night. In the morning, his roommate refused to let him leave without accompanying him. Strange, he thought. A day ago, he had cleaned open wounds at ground zero in what resembled a nuclear war zone. Why would he need protection from his roommate? Dr. Nijher hadn’t absorbed the news cycle that had fastened to the TVs across the globe.
He didn’t realize not only did he carry the weight of sights and sounds, the bloody flesh’s nauseous smell, but also the turban over his head. Undeterred and unable to let go, he snapped the aftermath pictures. Today, not in his scrubs, an average American wounded by the 9/11 trauma, he grasped the change when he stood across the attendant inside a gift shop.
When he asked the price to develop his camera roll in one hour, the shopkeeper retorted. “For you people, five hundred dollars.”
People filled the streets. They yelled Osama at Dr. Nijher. Two days. They differed as night and day, reckoning Dr. Nijher about who he was and who he wanted to be, the boy who grew up in the mountains of New York tucked far away from the Sikh community but protected inside his home’s bubble. He gave interviews, appeared in Newsweek, and crossed the country, speaking. Because that is who Dr. Nijher is: a hero.
I asked him today, twenty years later, have we healed as a nation? Do we know one another better? His calm and pragmatic response stunned me. Not quite. Dr. Nijher blames the lack of information for it. After 9/11, the Sikh community has outreached across the aisle better, but not enough, limiting it to the population centers. But where he lives, in Florida’s red rural county, north of Orlando—deep Trump country—there’s more work left, which doesn’t involve going from his gated community to the hospital or attending the Gurudwara every Sunday. Instead, we must better integrate with those who don’t know us or fear us. That doesn’t involve educating people or holding seminars for like-minded individuals, rather penetrating the very fabric of America through institutions like schools, sports, charities, local boards. Don’t live a disconnected life. Dr. Nijher coaches a sports team, which avails him with opportunities to do just that, break the stereotype, break the victim mentality, and assume responsibility for our American lives.
I thank Dr. Nijher for being willing to talk to me as I collected real-life stories on what it’s like to be a Sikh in post 9/11 America. While he hasn’t read my book, and this is not an endorsement, Land of Dreams, my upcoming fiction book, has provided an outlet for me as I delved into our divides. To diminish our distances is to reach across the aisle and learn about one another.
Releasing this June, my book House of Milk and Cheese (originally Land of Dreams) is an #ownvoices narration about growing up in an immigrant Sikh family in post 9/11 America. Subscribe at www.bookofdreams.us to win a FREE copy.
Image by Marisa04 from Pixabay
image source – Ivanovgood from pixabay