The Day the Towers Fell: A Journey That Began at JFK

The Day the Towers Fell: Looking Back

Some journeys begin with excitement and end up etched into memory for reasons you could never have imagined. Mine was one of them.

It was the evening of 8th September 2001 when a small group of us from TCS landed at JFK, full of the quiet nervousness that comes with starting a new chapter abroad. We were headed to New Jersey, where Extended Stay America would be our temporary home before we found our own apartments. I remember thinking how ordinary it all felt — just another set of newcomers finding their footing in a new country.

As our cab crossed one of the bridges into the city, a colleague who had been to New York before pointed toward the World Trade Center towers standing tall against the skyline. I looked up at them for the first time, not knowing — not able to know — that I was also looking at them for the last.

The weekend passed in the ordinary business of settling in: unpacking, adjusting to a new time zone, preparing for our first week at Lucent Technologies through TCS. None of it seemed remarkable at the time. Looking back now, I wish I had paused a little longer to take it all in, unaware of how sharply the following morning would divide our lives into before and after.

Monday, the 11th of September, started like any other workday. We went to pick up our rental car from Enterprise, expecting nothing more eventful than paperwork and directions to the office. Instead, we found the staff standing motionless in front of a television, watching images that didn’t yet make sense to us — planes striking the World Trade Center, again and again, on a loop we couldn’t look away from. I remember the confusion more than the fear at that moment; understanding came only in pieces, as the enormity of what we were witnessing settled in through the questions we asked and the answers we were given.

Driving into work that day, I felt oddly disconnected from my surroundings — navigating unfamiliar New Jersey roads, so different from the quiet stretches I’d grown used to in Colorado Springs, with no GPS or smartphone to guide me, only instinct and a few wrong turns using paper maps. In hindsight, that drive feels like a strange kind of grace: a small, ordinary struggle that gave my mind something to hold onto before the weight of the day caught up with me.

When we finally reached the Lucent office in Holmdel, our colleagues were already gathered near the reception, watching the same footage in silence. I remember the shared stillness of that room — the way everyone seemed to be processing something too large for words. My own instinct was to reach for home, to tell my family in Goa that I was safe. But every line to India was busy, over and over, and in that helplessness I understood, perhaps for the first time, how it felt to be far from home when the world seemed to be breaking. It was an email to a friend in Bangalore, still at his desk that evening, that finally carried word back to my family.

Looking back, that first day at work accomplished almost nothing in any practical sense — an ID card here, a workstation there, an email account set up amid the noise. And yet it remains one of the most vivid days of my life. It was meant to be the start of a career abroad; instead, it became a memory I carry not just as my own beginning, but as a small, personal thread in a moment the whole world would remember.