Prof R. (talking about emergency powers and state derogation) played us video footage from the September 11 attacks. He’d done the maths and didn’t think anyone was old enough to remember 9/11 clearly. I did the maths too: the oldest of my classmates would have been no more than 10 at the time, most would only have been 8 or 9. But if this is the first time some of them are seeing this footage (can that be true?) I’m a little unsettled by their reactions: a little detached, as if watching a rather tame action movie with bad effects, and several times a light tittering, when station after station the news anchors lost their composures on air when the second crash happened. I wonder if they really understood the context, that that second crash was happening live for the tv viewers, and that the first intimations that it was no mere accident, the first sensation of horror (not terror, that word’s politicisation only came later) were only just dawning.

But if I rebuke them implicitly (and they were only young children halfway across the world) what do I myself remember of 9/11? Very little, in fact. I was just beginning my third year of college, it was the second week of classes. That morning I had a 10am to go to: I got up and made tea and put on a dress and packed my textbooks. The very first television reports appeared just before 9am, and at the time it was not yet widely known on campus what had happened. In any case, I owned neither a TV nor radio (I still don’t have a TV), and such breaking news would have escaped my notice until they came into print– those were the days before 4G phones and Facebook and Twitter: once a day I read the Washington Post, which came to my doorstep in a folded bundle. I got up to go and a friend popped up on ICQ shouting: �Someone flew a plane into the WTC!� Huh? I said, confused, and shutting my laptop cover, went out the door. In my mind I saw a small private plane, an inexperienced pilot, an accident, tragic yes, but that was all. My morning class began and ended. Coming out of class, it was then I walked into a campus-wide susurration of confusion and rumour. By now TV screens were set up all over university grounds: in the student lounges and dining halls and common spaces. The same footage was playing over and over wherever I went. Many professors were dismissing their classes: go home, stay indoors, call your families. The next day the University cancelled classes officially. I remember sitting in my little dorm room all of that next day. My window overlooked Alderman Road, but no cars came down it, no joggers, no dogs nor prams nor students toting their backpacks. At one point I heard some of my suitemates talking in anxious whispers in the common living room, but I kept my door closed and did not go out to join them. It was not community I needed, nameless fear feeding off fear, but explanation, and meaning. And what I remember was the preternatural silence on grounds, but for the university chapel bells, tolling each hour through that long day.

If we have a tendency to pin particular dates, retroactively, to the emergence of a phenomenon, that was the year that terror, and the rhetoric of terror, first became a part of our consciousness. I lived in the US as an international student from 1999-2007, immediately before and after 9/11. That was the beginning of the sense of there being a �before� and an �after�.

Less than two months later I flew from Chicago to Philadelphia. Take off was delayed and we sat there in the plane on the tarmac, waiting drowsily. It was the Saturday evening of Thanksgiving weekend, and people were beginning to return to their various homes. Then a sudden commotion, and a man of Middle Eastern appearance, sitting two rows in front of me, was hauled protesting off the plane by security officers, and our plane had to be evacuated. I spent the night alone in an airport motel in Philly feeling unhappy. I was torn between sympathy for the man for the indignity of the manner of his removal, anger at what I saw was intercultural incompetency and prejudice, and intense fear that that he could have been a hijacker. To this day I do not know if we had been narrowly snatched from disaster or if the man had been the victim of hysteria and discriminatory profiling. What I knew then was that we were all afraid, and fear made us all behave poorly.