How my work kept me consumed
N J Ravi Chander
On the recent anniversary of the terror attacks on New York, my mind wandered back in time, recollecting the events that unfolded on that ‘Black Day’. I had a Kolkata flight to catch and was biding my time at the seating lounge inside the Bengaluru HAL airport that morning. My employers, the State Bank of India, had delegated me and a few others to the Foreign Department of the bank to reconcile, on a war-footing, the Nostro entries of Branches relating to Bangalore Circle.
To the uninitiated, a Nostro account refers to an account maintained by an Indian bank with overseas banks in foreign currency to settle its foreign currency transactions. It was the pre-automation age, and we manually plunged into the reconciliation exercise, by poring through registers, ledgers, ticket acknowledgements, SWIFT copies and other manual records.
That fateful day, there was an unusual activity inside the airport as passengers jostled with one another for space to get an unobstructed view of the pictures streaming on the television sets. From the corner of my eye, I could figure out an aeroplane crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and engulf the building in flames. I could glimpse people screaming and falling to their deaths from the floors above after it exploded into a ball of fire.
The images beamed on the magic box appeared like a racy, action-packed English-movie thriller, but I had no clue what was playing out. Huddled in a corner with my bag and baggage and busy browsing the newspaper, I displayed no inclination to enquire with the bystanders, many of whom stayed glued to the TV screen. The pictures streamed gave one the impression that an English movie was playing to keep the passengers entertained.
As the gates opened, I dragged myself out of my chair, picked the belongings and hurried to board the plane. Those were the pre-mobile days, and it was hard to communicate with the family. We chatted with our kin via the humble landline telephone by joining the lengthy queues at the phone booths or through the medium of letters or telegram. In those days of snail mail, it took a week or more for a note posted from Kolkata to arrive in Bengaluru.
It was a practice to call up the kin soon after reaching the destination. A nervous mother picked up the phone, as I reached out to the family from Kolkata a short while after landing. “Are you aware that the militants associated with the extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four aeroplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States? “Are you safe” she inquired, in a voice choking with emotion.
The other family members huddled beside her, were relieved to learn that I had a safe journey. They had found the videos frightful, much like everybody else who saw them. Though I was travelling to the ‘City of Joy’ and not to the land of Uncle Sam, the spine-chilling live videos, had put the kin on edge. They also spared no effort to send out fervent prayers to the gods for my safety.
Only post-conversation it dawned on me that the pictures streaming on television back home at the airport was no action flick but a dreaded terrorist attack – 9/11 to be precise!
(The author is a retired banker who has taken up writing as a pastime. He writes for the Deccan Herald, The New Indian Express, The Tribune, The Hitavada, The City Tab, The Hans India and Kashmir Vision)
