It was a pretty harrowing experience for my family on 9/11 and a couple of months thereafter, since I landed on Detroit on the 8th. On the ninth , I took a taxi from Dearborn (I was staying there in a hotel) to my Allenpark office. I could see a car speeding by, with a lady holding a hanky to her mouth. I thought she would have had a tiff with her boyfriend, since I didn’t have a chance to watch TV or listen to Radio on that day. On reaching the office, the lady who was to take me around the office for introductions (I had gone for a project to our US office for 2.5 months), was pretty sombre in mood, mouthing her thoughts to the outside world in typical American fashion. It was from some of these loud thoughts that I picked up the info about the first attack. Following the incident, every channel in TV was focussed entirely on those incidents, showing pictures of desperate people jumping out of the WTC building, and a plethora of talk shows on the same. Immediately after hearing the news, when in office, I didn’t have the presence of mind to call up my family out in India. They didn’t have my office number as my cubicle was set up in the office on the ninth. When I reached my hotel in the evening, I could see that there were voice mails galore in my room telephone. Some of my relatives in the US had called up after receiving frantic SOS calls from my family. I immediately called up my wife and parents and they heaved sighs of relief. Post 9/11, as I walked through the huge Kmart shop near to the hotel, I could sense a kind of insecurity among the Americans, as they watched the wheat-skinned Asians, many of whom are from the Mideast. It was only when the news came out that a Sikh gentleman was shot dead by a crazy American, that panic struck me. I seldom ventured out of my hotel room after coming back from work. This continued for at least a month. This news was not telecast repeatedly, a la the bombings, and so my family couldn’t hear of the same. It was only after coming back to India that I mentioned about the same to my wife and she was thunder-struck. In the month of December, on my return trip, I was being frisked by the security at the airport. The guy was pretty jovial, when he was doing the same. When he saw the ’’raksha’’ attached to my gold chain, his manner changed. He assumed that it was a suicidal pellet which the Americans are pretty familiar with, courtesy their movies. It took some convincing from my part to explain the relevance of the same. I had to explain the belief associated with Hindu religious practice of attaching rakshas to ward off mishaps. When in the lounge waiting for the plane, I was looking at the faces of all my fellow passengers, to see if I could detect a terrorist amongst them. The travel to Frankfurt was a big ordeal, with me looking at any person getting out of his seat in a suspicious manner. Finally, when I reached good old India, I was able to shrug off my fears.