In one brilliant cataclysmic flash, Ferooz Hassan saw his entire world collapse.
It had been meant to be a day of joy. Hassan had flown into New York City the night before to surprise his son, Yasser, whose friends in America all called him Jesse.
It was Yasser’s 25th birthday and he would not have expected his father to do more than to call him with birthday greetings but Ferooz Hassan had personally arranged to take over an entire middle Eastern restaurant in the shadow of the World Trade Center, two blocks downtown and forty stories below the WTC offices where his son worked as a midlevel manager in one of Hassan’s oil production companies.
Of course, these days, Ferooz Hassan had people who got paid to handle such mundane details as renting a restaurant, but the man thought this was too personal a matter to let staff handle. Yasser was his only son, a good, bright, religious young man who had never complained about the long hours, the sweat, or the irritation of learning the family business from the bottom up.
And today, on Yasser’s twenty-fifth birthday, his father planned to tell him that his apprenticeship was over, that now he would be moving into running the company’s day-to-day operations. And someday, but not too soon, Allah willing, may his name be praised, the entire Hassan dynasty would be the boy’s to run.
Today would be a great day for the Hassan family.
It was September 11, 2001.
At 10:05 a.m., Ferooz Hassan was headed for his limousine to drive the two blocks from the restaurant to the World Trade Center, where he planned to surprise his son with birthday greetings and then invite the whole office to the luncheon celebration.
But then he felt, more than heard, the impact that made his bushy eyebrows arch in surprise. Then fear. Even as he looked uptown toward the World Trade Center, three muscular men, his personal protectors, closed around him and moved him back toward the restaurant’s front doors.
Ferooz’s breath came short; he looked about but there were no answers, just the terrible walls of smoke rising over the city. Then he heard someone call out that an aircraft accident had occurred at the center’s north tower.
But Yasser was in the south tower. Ferooz felt a brief moment of guilty relief.
Inside the restaurant, he tried to call Yasser’s office but phone calls would not go through. He tried his son’s cell phone but there was not even a ring. He kept trying to call, even as a restaurant worker had turned on a small television that showed the destruction of the north tower. And then, as Ferooz watched in heart-stopping disbelief, another plane flew directly into the south tower.
The tower where Yasser worked. Yasser, who was twenty-five years old today, who was a good, bright, religious young man.
“I have to get there,” Ferooz said and leaped toward the door with more energy than anyone who knew him casually would have expected. His three burly assistants stopped him again.
“Sir, it’s no use. Local police will already have every approach to the area sealed off,” one of them said. Ferooz stared at him, knowing he was right, hating the truth. Then he ran to the manager, gripping the man’s shirt in both fists.
“Do you have binoculars?” he asked. His voice was hard but his eyes were pleading.
“What?”
“Please. I must see it.”
Moments later Ferooz Hassan stood on the roof of the twelve story building that housed the small Middle Eastern restaurant. He hardly felt the sun on his swarthy skin as his deep-set eyes stared through the borrowed binoculars at the ground level entrances to the smoking building.
It was a mass of humanity, of confusion, of horror, and Ferooz stood there, searching into the heart of the chaos for a look at one face, the face that since the death of his wife nine years earlier had held his entire future, his life, his world.
He saw every face that raced out of the building and every uniformed man who disregarded his own safety to run inside, into the mouth of danger and death. Had it been for this that he had come to the United States twenty-five years earlier to give his son the gift of American citizenship? Had he brought Yasser to his doom?
Then the world shook again as the tower began to fold in on itself like a man whose spine had been suddenly broken. That was the moment that Ferooz Hassan began to pray.
He prayed that an angel would sweep down from the heavens and rescue his son from this disaster. He prayed to all the gods who might be to intercede for his boy who was truly one of the world’s innocents. He swore on the soul of his beloved son that he would pay any price, do any penance, dedicate his life to whatever mission Allah had for him if only his son could be saved from this terrible tragedy.
And then, in one of those insane unbelievable coincidences that nevertheless sometimes happen, he saw Yasser in the doorway. He knew him by his long thin frame and his wavy black hair, cut a little too long. He was barely walking, dragged forward by a pair of angels.
Angels in blue uniforms, with grim expressions. New York’s finest, they were called. They were running powerfully, racing against a tide they knew would engulf them.
Ferooz watched in terrifying slow motion as the cloud of debris belched forward, erasing the front of the building and covering the area with a deadly white dust. The tidal wave of debris reared up behind them, like a giant gray hand poised to swat any insects in its path.
He saw Yasser stumble. Ferooz’s eyes ached but he could not blink. Just as the cloud seemed destined to swallow them all, he saw one of the police officers go down. But before the officer disappeared beneath the gray wave, his final act was to push Yasser forward. His partner, a little ahead, dragged on Yasser’s arm.
And then the flowing gray lava of destruction began to slow down, to lose its forward momentum, and Yasser kept moving away, away, away toward safety.
Ferooz tasted the salt of tears that ran down his face onto his lips.
Yasser, who was twenty-five today, who was good and bright and religious, was safe. The angels had come. The angels were always there.
But one of them was lost.
Ferooz Hassan looked skyward and swore to Allah that he who was lost would never be forgotten.