By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : He loved living in the clouds, gazing down at the panoramic view of New York down there from his office on the 97th floor of the World Trade Centre. Little did he know that the view from his window that fateful day of Sep 11, 2001 would be his last glance at the city he had come to love.
“He always had a wish to work in World Trade Centre, and when he got this job at Marsh & McLennan he was on cloud nine,” recalled Rekha Kanoongo speaking about her cousin brother, Nagpur born Rajesh Khandelwal, who trained as an aeronautical engineer, but switched to computers when he came to the US.
“He loved working on the 97th floor. He would call me and say don’t take this bridge, too much traffic,” Kanoongo told IANS a day after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
“I can see the clouds today. I love to be in between the clouds…he loved the whole scenic view from there as he was an artist himself.”
A day before 9/11, Rajesh had come to their house after work “to spend some time with me talking over tea,” recalled Kanoongo, who runs a restaurant and a video store in New Jersey.
But “when he came I was busy talking to my friend. Rajesh bhaiya waited for me and than he left very disappointed that I did not have time for him.”
So she left a message for him on Yahoo Messenger asking him to call her next morning. “But that call never came,” said Kanoongo and to her eternal regret she realised that “we shouldn’t wait to do or say anything to anyone, because we don’t know if there is a tomorrow for us.”
Khandelwal was just 33 when death snatched him from his perch in the clouds with a child who doesn’t know who his father was. His spouse has married again and moved on and would not talk about those days.
But Kanoongo cannot forget and like every year this year too she went to the World Trade Centre despite pleas from everyone at home and friends and family in India as “terrorism was in the air and I shouldn’t, but I wanted to go so I did.”
While returning she asked a New York policeman about directions. He in turn asked from where she was and what she was doing at WTC. When she told him she was from India and “mentioned about losing bhaiya,” he took out a small badge with WTC written on it and gave it to her.
“I cannot tell you how it felt at that moment; it was like a blessing sent to me from up there.”
Like Kanoongo, Dimpal Patel, who also used to work at Marsh & McLennan, too can’t forget. For it was he who had told his friend Khandelwal about the job opening at the WTC.
Patel who was working as a consultant there left on completion of his project a few months before 9/11. But they still travelled together from Edison where they lived and often went to the cafeteria in WTC for breakfast. But that fateful day he left alone.
“I was working for Deutsche Bank on 7th floor at a nearby building. When the first plane hit the WTC, our building was shaken and the power went off so we all ran out to see what had happened and were immediately told by our supervisor to leave the building by stairs.”
“We all went down and when we came out of building we saw fire on around 80th floor of WTC where my friend Rajesh Khandelwal used to work.
As he was calling his wife from a telephone booth near the corner of WTC, “I saw the other plane above my head and then a split second later hitting the second tower of WTC,” Patel said.
“I was standing away from the building and saw people jumping from the tallest building to certain death. It was like a paper flying from top of the building. It was a painful moment to see people dying and no one could come to their help.”
“When the second tower collapsed we all just ran from there to the ferry with a big blast of black dust following us. The ferry took us to the other side of the river” and somehow made it home in ten hours and “rushed to Rajesh’s uncle’s house where everyone was waiting for both of us.”
“I was worried about my friend Rajesh, hoping against hope that he would have somehow cheated death. But that was not to be.”
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])