Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 13, 2002
Visa, it's available for everywhere
you want to be, except the United States.
The take-off on the familiar credit
card slogan could well be the cruel joke on the families and dependents
of several 9/11 Indian victims who trooped in to the New York Palace Hotel
on Wednesday evening to meet Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee.
They spoke of the pain of losing
their loved ones, the turmoil in their lives, and the difficulty they were
having in staying in or returning to the US to salvage their remains. Shefali
Agarwal is a typical case. Her husband Alok Agarwal was working with the
firm Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center when
it was hit, decimating the entire office.
She was on a dependant visa and
visiting India with her son Ankur When the tragedy occurred. They lost
their status, and are now here on a short-term visitor visa, even though
they say they need to be in the US to salvage the bits and pieces of their
lives.
Ankur, a bouncy, precocious kid
of ten, wants to stay in the US and continue his schooling at New Jersey
Although he read out a poem about how proud he was to be an Indian, he
says he wants to be in America because of its beauty and its freedom.
Indian-American Vasantha Vyalakur
has a different kind of visa problem. She lost her husband Sankara Vyalakur,
who worked for more than two, decades as an auditor for the New York State
Taxes and Finance Department located in WTC II. Now she is all alone and
would like her married niece to visit her from India to keep her company
for some weeks. The visa has been denied twice.
US lawmakers, including India Caucus
Frank Pallone, have Promised to introduce legislation to give permanent
resident status to dependents of Indian WTC victims. No word on if or when
it will come through.
Some 200 Indians, including temporary
workers, NRIs and PIOs, are thought to have lost their lives in the WTC
collapse. Only about 20 were Indian passport holders and most of their
families were flown in from India by the American Red Cross. Some of them
brought "Ganga Jal" (water from the River Ganga) to sprinkle on Ground
Zero while other carried bits of earth from the site to scatter it in India.
Some came not for visa but for the
vision. "I wanted to see the place where he worked. He had such a wonderful
life ahead of him", Venkatasubba Reddy of Cuddapah said of his son Kiran
Kumar before choking up.
Kiran was working as a software
engineer with the firm Marsh and McLennan on the 96th floor of the North
Tower when it was struck by the aircraft flown by Mohammed Atta.
