The following is an eye-witness account of the events that transpired on September 11th, 2001. I have trouble believing that it happened more than six years ago. That cursed day is etched so deeply in my psyche that it refuses to get dusty and cobwebbed like so many of my other memories. I was once told that the human brain subconsciously blocks out bad memories. Six years later, I’m finally convinced that mine is not working as it should.

The internship ended in June 2001 and I was fortunate enough to land a job with a leading photo lab in New York City called Coloredge. Located on 21st st. between 5th and 6th avenue, these guys were truly professional. They operated out of four floors and were a one-stop-shop for all things photography and photo-finishing. They had the works – million dollar laser printers that consumed power by the kilowatt, scanners with resolving powers down to the nano-realm and visualization monitors the size of drive-in theater screens. My geek wet dream had come true.

They also had a clientele worth dying for – Macys, Lancome, Estee Lauder, BCBG Max Azria and Armani to name a few. Very soon I found myself working on the raw scans of legendary fashion photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Max Vadukul and sometimes even the great Mario Testino himself. Testino’s negs and transparencies were handled with the kind of care Moses gave his two tablets on his way down from Mount Sinai. (I imagine he was very, very careful).

In a nutshell, life couldn’t be better. I loved my job, I loved my co-workers and thanks to Jai, I loved my apartment in Battery Park City.

Jai, my superstar cousin with a built in magnetic compass that tells him where north-west or south-east is, blindfolded. Jai, with math skills that can put IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer to shame. Jai, the analyst who spent over a 100 hours at Merrill Lynch every week earning them more millions than they deserve. Jai, the Benevolent, who saw me floundering for a place to stay and let me crash at his pad in Battery Park City - the most beautiful part of Manhattan.* Built on debris excavated during the construction of the World Trade Center it has a beautiful Marina with spectacular views of The Hudson River and New Jersey.  The other thing that it had spectacular views of were the TwinTowers themselves– we were only a two minute walk from them.

Fast forward to the morning of September 11th 2001. The shower in my bathroom completely drowned out the sound of the first plane crashing into the north tower. At 8.46am I had no clue of the events that were unfolding just a couple of hundred meters away from me. I had no clue that American Airlines Flight 11 had just gone from being an “is” to a “was”. For me, this was still like any other day, and I was late for work. It was only when I looked out the window did I realize that something was amiss. Pieces of glass glinting in the sunlight were falling all around our back yard. I couldn’t quite understand what had happened and so I looked out of the window and saw for the first time the black gaping hole and twisted metal of the north tower’s top floors. My first thought was there had been an electrical short circuit or a gas leak (one doesn’t automatically attribute fires in buildings to 767 collisions). I walked back into the bedroom and hurriedly put on my clothes because fire or no fire, I was now really getting late for work.

Just as I was putting my shoes on, I heard the loud drone of what sounded like an old-school war plane. We’ve all heard that twin engine sound in a World War 2 movie or at an airshow. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like a modern day Boeing. (I now attribute it to the fact that the plane was flying a) so fast b) so low and c) was being subjected to stresses well outside its design spec.) Then I heard the explosion and I remember breaking out into a cold sweat as I raced toward the window. I reached it to witness a massive ball of fire erupting in slow motion all around the upper-midsection of the South tower. I thought I was hallucinating or dreaming. Actually, I thought I was doing both. Call me dumb, but I still didn’t connect the sound of the plane with the explosion. Keep in mind that I still came from a pre-9/11 world where planes didn’t collide with buildings. I didn’t have the imagination or the mental acumen to appreciate the fact that I was witnessing the worst terrorist attack in human history.

I turned on the TV and found that every single channel on air that day was broadcasting the exact same feed. I saw the amateur footage of the first plane and the sickening swerve of the second 757 just before it punched its way thru the upper floors of the second tower. Because it was an uncensored live feed, I also saw gruesome images of people jumping from the towers to their deaths, a hundred stories below. (Thankfully, the stations pulled that footage off the air in subsequent telecasts.)

Jai came home at that very moment, sweating profusely and on the verge of what looked like a nervous breakdown. He had seen the whole thing from the 33rd floor of the Merrill Lynch tower – right next to the World Trade Center buildings. From his office windows, he saw the second plane flying in at eye level. He saw people opening windows in the affected floors and choosing to leap to their deaths rather than suffocate or burn in the jet fuel. He was subjected to the “up close and personal” version, and it was something that would haunt him for months to come after the attacks.

For the next few minutes as we huddled around the TV, I remember us losing the ability to form coherent sentences other than to ask each other the same question again and again, “What is going on?” We stared blankly at the TV screen finding it hard to come to terms with what had just happened. The fear and helplessness was making me sick to my stomach. And it was getting progressively worse, almost perfectly synched with the rising crescendo of the sirens and screams outside. I’ve been scared before, but 9/11 showed me that fear comes in varying magnitudes. On that day, fear was a physical presence sitting in the room with us as we watched the instantaneous obliteration of thousands of lives, just two streets corners away. I pray that I never have to feel that scared again.

Suddenly, everything went dead. The TV flickered for a second and blanked out. Everything else in the house followed suit – the power, the cell phones and even the emergency lights in the hallways. Seconds later, we felt the entire apartment tremble, just as a deafening groan cut through the sirens. We rushed to the window and saw the source of the sound – the south tower was collapsing after burning for almost an hour. My ears started popping uncontrollably because of the pressure waves caused by the volume of air the building was displacing on its way down. The last thing we saw before the ‘fight or flight’ response took over was a thick grey wall of smoke climbing over the rooftops of adjacent buildings and heading toward us.** We ran down the stairwell, half screaming and half stumbling over each other in the darkness of the unlit stairwell till we made it to the lobby level. Lower Manhattan was now experiencing nightfall at 10.00am. Our apartment was completely engulfed in the debris and smoke from the millions of tons of burning metal and concrete of the towers. It was so dark that we couldn’t see two inches in front of us. The building security guard had a flash light and he motioned us into the children’s play room because it was the one room in the building that was furthest away from the towers. When we entered the room we found all the other residents in the building huddling together in groups on the floor. Some were crouched in corners crying, some cradled their heads between their legs and some just wore blank expressions, rocking back and forth in utter shock. The worst off were the women with husbands working in the towers. Understandably, they were hysterical. An old man pulled out a tiny pocket radio and tried tuning into a station, any station. When he finally picked up on one, we heard the newscaster fighting over static to tell us that a man by the name of Osama Bin Laden had taken responsibility for the attacks.

Just as we were figuring out a way to leave the apartment, the rumbling started again. The screams intensified in the playroom and we instinctively covered our heads. This time around though, we knew what it was. The north tower had buckled under the strain as well. Half expecting the roof to come crashing down on our heads, we crouched in that dark playroom waiting for the inevitable. God in his infinite wisdom however, had other plans for us. The rumbling stopped after a while. We waited a little longer for the smoke to subside and when we saw some faint traces of sunlight we dashed out of the apartment with only one purpose in mind – to get as far away from Lower Manhattan as possible.  The apartment courtyard, a paradise of green trees and even greener lawns only an hour ago, was covered in gray ash and debris. Oddly enough, we found hundreds of randomly scattered pieces of paper lying on the floor. I picked up a sheet and saw that the edges had been burned away leaving only the middle intact. It was a cost-benefit analysis of some sort and I felt a pang of concern for the analyst who was working on it. I hope he lived to finish his report.

We ran by the pier till we met an NYPD officer who was helping others like us vacate the island on ferries. In some weird way, it was comforting to see that he was as shell shocked and disoriented as we were. He helped us onto a boat that took us across the Hudson to Jersey. Relief camps had already been set up at Jersey and we took the opportunity to clean the ash off our faces and clothes.

With nowhere to live, we decided to take the Amtrak to Philadelphia and stay with Jai’s girlfriend at Wharton. The New Jersey Transit Authority, The Metropolitan Transit Authority and Amtrak had issued directives not to charge people trying to get out of Manhattan.

The months that followed were the toughest. The powers that be disallowed any re-entry into Battery Park city for two and a half months. My boss came to my rescue and I crashed at his place for most of that time. When we were finally allowed back into our rotting corpse of an apartment, we salvaged what we could and moved out immediately. We both relocated to the Upper East Side to get as far away as we could from downtown New York

When the last of the fires at ground zero died out, so did any hope of finding survivors. The official death toll as a direct result of the attack was estimated at 2974. I saw New York City, the epitome of all things superlative, plunge into a deep depression. Pictures of missing people filled the streets and covered every bus stop. The inflow of work into Coloredge came to a grinding halt and along with it, so did the economy. It would take weeks for the city to begin the process of recovery.

New York City is known for its rude drivers, but on September 12th not a single car blared its horn.

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* All this praise for Jai is mostly because I missed his wedding and he has never forgiven me for it. I will have to spend the rest of my life trying to get on his good side.

**If you've watched "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" you will know exactly what I'm talking about. Remember the scene when the machines detonate an atomic bomb in a populated city? Remember the shockwave of fire razing the city to the ground? Just replace fire with smoke, ash and debris and you will have a close representation of what was coming toward us.

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The following are shots I took from my bed room window and some shots i took of my room after the first tower collapsed.