9/11, as South Asian Families Remember It
A final care package. A last kiss. A narrow escape. Twenty-five years later, they recount how one morning forever changed their lives.
“I had this dream that there was some sort of a building explosion, and somehow my dad was… killed,” Cheena Jain told The Juggernaut. Her mom told then-7-year-old Cheena not to worry. “When you have a dream like that, that means that the person’s going to have a long life,” she told her daughter in 1991.
Ten years later, Cheena’s father, computer scientist Yudhvir S. Jain, went to work at the World Trade Center. Yudhvir had just sent Cheena, a freshman in college, a care package full of “eatables” and a clipped photo of one of her favorite restaurants.
Cheena would never see her father again.
On the morning of 9/11, hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, which collapsed at 9:59 a.m., followed by the North Tower at 10:28 a.m. Nearly 3,000 people from more than 90 countries died. Among them were at least 57 South Asians: immigrants building new lives. These are some of their stories — told by survivors and the loved ones of the people we lost.