9/10

Down in lower Manhattan, you have to crane your neck to see the sky, cut into angled jigsaw pieces by the tall buildings.

If you could put all those pieces together, I rhetorically ask, would it be a perfect sky?

Agar saare tukdon ko jod do to kya aasman mukammal hoga?

And then suddenly, past the roadblocks, we can see the sky complete; a beautiful empty blue, clouds floating serene across. We are at Ground Zero.

From the police guarded perimeter, it looks like a foundation dug, a deep construction site. It is the presence of sky that tells you what a gaping hole has been rent into the heart of the city, the mirrored glass of the buildings around unused to reflecting emptiness.

Please clear the area.

We have come to see what isn’t there, says Lynn, as she tries to capture the absence with her camera. We watch the people standing behind the plate glass of the World Finacial Centre, looking down at the hole, obscured behind the reflections of buildings all around, and emptiness in the centre. We join them, in that place, where as soon as you pass the display remembering 9/11, they are selling designer chocolates, the new Skinny Black Pant, and the foyer looks straight out of Las Vegas.

The construction site, we learn, is that of a memorial; entitled Reflecting Absence.

an earlier meditation on 9/11.

Samanth on five years after.