Finding Deepika

In about an hour, I'll be heading downtown for a commemoration ceremony called "Patriot Day" that my hometown puts on every year on the anniversary of 9/11. I haven't gone every year. I missed the last two because the year prior, I was unnerved by a speech given by a local politician about America, patriotism, and those who perished being martyrs. It made me realize just how politicized and fraught by interpretation this private moment of grief for so many, including me and my family, had become.

My cousin Deepika died on 9/11 on the 97th floor of 1 WTC. She was a contractor at Marsh & McLennan and had recently moved to New Jersey from Hyderabad with her husband and young son. She was an immigrant, a mom, who came to this country hoping that her son might receive better medical care for a condition he had developed. She was 33, beautiful, smart, soft spoken, and my family was proud of her. She was the first-born grandchild on my mother's side. I'm the last-born. I went to her wedding on my first trip to India. I remember her being kind and gentle with my sister and me, and how happy my mom was to see her as a bride.

But was she a patriot? She didn't choose to serve in any war or expect to die. She doesn't look like the image that the word patriot conjures up in my mind, the one it's been force fed. What is a patriot? Am I patriot?

In the wake of 9/11, countless people who looked like me experienced racism in our schools, workplaces, and communities. A few months after, my mother and I got called terrorists by an older white couple while picking up a pizza down the street from our house. My mother, her overwhelming grief at the loss of her niece still rising behind her eyes, was stunned, breathless, hysterical, in a way I had never seen her be before. Me, with the strongest fight response in probably the entire family, frozen, unable to speak. It was a brutal moment of othering I will never forget.

I think about all of this and more in the weeks leading up to 9/11, my brain beginning the processing sometime in July when the twin towers content and images start appearing in my feeds. I deleted Instagram about a month ago in preparation, knowing I'd be inundated, that my algorithm somehow knows about all of this and will heartlessly remind me.

It's been 25 years since I stood at the top of the stairs that morning before school, watching my mom watch my cousin die on TV in a building on the other side of the country, away from her home and her parents and the family who loved her. 25 years since watching all of my aunts, uncles, and older cousins make flyers with pictures of her in western clothes on them to descend upon Manhattan in search of her, knowing probably they wouldn't be able to find her, but looking anyway because that's what you do for love.

I'm grateful that I got to visit the 9/11 memorial with my family when it first opened. It was a misty morning in Manhattan when we made the walk. I noticed that we stopped talking as we approached Ground Zero. There was still scaffolding everywhere, a reminder of how much time had passed, but still not enough. We bought some roses and arrived at the reflecting pools. Where was she? We all walked around searching, each of us looking away from one another lest we catch eyes. Then my sister flagged us down. We had found her.

I don't terribly want to go to Patriot Day, but I will because there will be a flag there with her name on it, placed in grass on the piece of earth I call home, and I owe it to my family – her parents and my grandmother who are all gone, my aunts, uncles, and all of our cousins and their children, and my mother – to find her there, visiting.