BY Aneesha Capur
TEN years after the 9/11 attacks, I am still grappling with where I’m from and where I belong.
I was born in Kolkata where my parents were living at that time, although they are from different parts of India.
We moved to Nairobi when I was five. I spent 10 years there, through the attempted coup of 1982 and the pervasive sense of insecurity, especially for the Indian immigrant population who had been in Kenya for generations and were also known as Kenyan Asians or “Muhindis”. I attended an all-girls Cat-holic primary school where my best friends were English/Malay, Ugandan, Kenyan African and Kenyan Asian.
My African friends used to say that I was from India, but I was not Muhindi, maybe because then it was unusual for an Indian family to have African friends the difference was apparent.
I completed my O-Levels at an English school in Nairobi where the teachers were from the UK. My friends there were Israeli, Argentine and Italian. My Israeli friend’s dad was rumoured to be from Mossad (the Israeli secret service). Spies seem to have shown up throughout my life.
My university education included studying in London and a summer spent in Vermont learning Spanish, where most of my fellow first-year students were agents sent by the FBI to get a grasp of the language for their jobs.
I had spent 12 years in the United States when 9/11 happened. I had wor-ked in Washington DC on consulting projects for USAID, the government agency providing American economic and humanitarian assistance worldwide for more than 40 years. I had then worked in New York, the city where I felt most at homein America, in consulting for the financial services industry. I had just earned an MBA from Wharton earlier that summer.
America – including me – was in shock. A colleague had died in the towers. All job prospects for someone with my cv, suited for work in New York, evaporated.
On that day, while we watched the news to learn who the attackers were, I said to some American friends that it might have been Osama bin Laden who was also responsible for the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (a rather distressing day for me since my dad was in Nairobi at that time, and we had lost people we had known) only to receive blank stares in response.
Despite that, I felt American. I identified with American society because of my education, multicultural experience and personal values. And I had a group of peers from different parts of the world who had made similar choices.
America offered highly developed personal freedoms to members of its society; a society which was made up of different colours and creeds. At that moment, my identity was clear: this was my country and we were under attack. I felt compelled to do my bit in any small way.
I first applied for a consulting position with the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), but discovered that I needed to be a US citizen given the high visibility of that position in an area of homeland security. I then responded to a posting through Wharton for a job with the CIA.
Looking back now, my lack of preparedness for my phone interview with the CIA agent seems comical. I was asked not to tell anyone about the interview in case things worked out and I was posted to some country under the guise of a fabricated position so no one would connect the dots.
“It’s like trying to put toothpaste back into its tube,” warned the agent.
I had already told my parents who had told others and so on. When asked which countries were geopolitically important, in addition to the obvious post-9/11 response, I talked about Kenya’s position as a portal to the Islamic North as well as sub-Saharan Africa and the shared challenges of terrorism in India. The agent focused on the Arab states and Pakistan.
When asked if I knew there were varieties of Muslims, I dived into an exp-lanation of the differences between Ismailis and Dawoodi Bohras. The agent expected to hear the primary distinction between Shias and Sunnis, and an awareness that there existed Kurds and Pashtuns. Eventually, he said he wasn’t sure of my commitment and suggested I visit their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to get an idea of the work involved, the required level of patriotism.
I didn’t follow up; if there was anything that phone discussion cleared up for me, it was that you didn’t pursue discussions with the CIA lightly.
I ended up going back to Kenya in December 2001 to see my parents who were based there again after living in Zambia and Tanzania. But my focus was New York; I wanted to help rebuild the city in some way.
I returned to Manhattan and joined the large, growing unemployed ranks with similar qualifications: an MBA, management consulting and/or invest-ment banking experience.
After helping raise money for an NYC Charter School for the Arts, I found a calling that was a better fit than espionage or working in corporate America. I discovered a path that allowed me to better deal with the fragments of places that made up my identity. I started to write.
Ten years later, while we still grieve, remember and attempt to recover, the idea of belonging for me has returned to its more complicated state. I’m married to an Irishman and now have ties in an additional country. We are based in San Francisco and this part of America, despite the troubled economy, is still a land of opportunity and stability. It feels like a harmonious, if at times sheltered, setting far away from the terror that’s been inflicted on other parts of the world.
Although I have no family to bring me back, a few weeks ago, I returned to Kenya. On the flight, my husband and I sat next to a man who described himself as “working for the American Embassy”. He wouldn’t get more specific than that.
On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it seems appropriate that I’m in Kenya, the country of my childhood and a place of the foreshadowing of the terror unleashed on America by bin Laden and al-Qaeda. With the publication of my debut novel this year, I’ve travelled to China, India and am on my way to Indonesia in October.
America remains my country of residence but I still feel most at home in situations where people don’t have a simple answer when asked where they are from, where people can’t rest comfortably on a stable notion of identity.
Aneesha Capur’s debut novel, Stealing Karma, is set in Kenya and India. For more information about the author, visit www.aneeshacapur.com
