Read the following story ‘After the World Trade Centre’ by Amitav Ghosh and try to understand the meaning it conveys. This is a story about a man named Frank who worked in the World Trade Center in New York. On September 11, 2001, the towers were attacked and Frank helped other people escape even though he did not make it out alive.
It tells the story of Frank's courage and sacrifice trying to save others during a tragedy. This original text is followed by important questions and their answers that are helpful for the students of all levels.
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After the World Trade Centre [Original text]
In 1999, soon after moving to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, my wife and I were befriended by Frank and Nicole De Martini, a couple whose lives were closely twinned with the towers of the World Trade Center. Both Frank and Nicole are architects. As Construction Manager of the World Trade Center, Frank’s offices were on the 88th floor of Tower 1. Nicole is an employee of the engineering firm that built the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson Associates. Hired as a “surveillance engineer”, she was a member of a team that conducted year-round structural integrity inspections of the twin towers. Her offices were on the 35th floor of Tower 2.
Frank is forty-nine, sturdily-built, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and deeply-etched laugh lines around his eyes. His manner is expansively avuncular and nothing pleases him more than when the conversation turns to a subject on which he can offer his expert advice. For Frank, the twin towers were both a livelihood and a passion: he would speak of them with the absorbed fascination with which poets sometimes speak of Dante’s canzones. Nicole is forty-two, blonde and blue-eyed, with a gaze that is at once brisk and friendly. She was born in Basel, Switzerland, and met Frank while studying ‘design’ in New York. They have two children, Sabrina, 10, and Dominic, 8, who are unusually well-matched with mine, in age, gender and temperament: it was through our children that we first met.
Frank and Nicole’s relationship with the World Trade Center was initiated by the basement bomb explosion of 1993. Shortly afterwards, Frank was hired to do bomb damage assessment. An assignment that he had thought would last only a few months, turned quickly into a consuming passion. “He fell in love with the buildings,” Nicole told me. “For him they represented an incredible human feat; he was awed by their scale and magnitude, by the innovative design features, and by the efficiency of the use of materials. One of his most-repeated sayings about the towers is that they were built to take the impact of a light airplane.”
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Frank and Nicole dropped their children off at their school, in Brooklyn Heights, and then drove on to the World Trade Center. Traffic was light and they arrived unexpectedly early, so Nicole decided to go up to Frank’s office for a quick cup of coffee. It was about a quarter past eight when they reached Frank’s office. A half hour later, Nicole pushed back her chair and stood up to go. She was on her way out the door, when the walls and the floor suddenly heaved under the shock of a massive impact. Franks’ office commanded a panoramic southwards view, looking towards the Statue of Liberty and the harbour. Now, through the thick plates of glass, she saw a wave of flame bursting out overhead, like a torrent spewing from the floodgates of a dam. The blast was clearly centered on the floor directly above: she assumed that it was a bomb. Neither she nor Frank was unduly alarmed: very few people knew the building’s strength and resilience better than they. They assumed that the worst was over and the structure had absorbed the impact: it was now a question of coping with the damage. Sure enough, within seconds of the initial tumult, a sense of calm descended on their floor. Frank herded Nicole and a group of some two dozen other people into a room that was relatively free of smoke. Then, he went off to scout the escape routes and stairways. Minutes later he returned to announce that he had found a stairway that was intact: they could reach it fairly easily, by climbing over a pile of rubble.
The bank of rubble that barred the entrance to the fire escape was about knee-high. Just as she was about to clamber over, Nicole saw that Frank was hanging back. She stopped beside him and begged him to come with her, imploring him to think of the family. He shook his head and told her to go on, without him. There were people on their floor who’d been hurt by the blast, he said; he would follow her down as soon as he had helped the injured on their way. She could tell that she would have no success in swaying her husband; his belief in the building was absolute; he was not persuaded that the structure was seriously harmed - nor for that matter was she, but now she could only think of her children. She joined the people in the stairway while Frank stayed behind to direct the line.
Frank must have gone back to the Port Authority offices shortly afterwards for he made a call from his desk at about nine o’clock. He called his sister Nina on West 93rd street in Manhattan and said: ‘Nicole and I are fine. Don’t worry.’
Nicole remembers the descent as quiet and orderly. The evacuees went down in single file, leaving room for the firemen who were running in the opposite direction. All along the way, people helped each other, offering water and support to those who needed them. On every floor, there were people to direct the evacuees and there was never any sense of panic. In the lower reaches of the building, there was even electricity. The descent took about half an hour, and on reaching the plaza Nicole began to walk in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. She was within a few hundred feet of the Bridge when the first tower collapsed. “It was like the onset of a nuclear winter,” she recalls. “Suddenly everything went absolutely quiet and you were in the middle of a fog that was as blindingly bright as a snowstorm on a sunny day.”
It was early evening by the time Nicole reached her home in Fort Greene. She had received calls from several people who had seen Frank on their way down the fire escape, but he had not been heard from directly. Their children stayed with us that night while Nicole sat up with Frank’s sister, Nina, waiting by the telephone. It was decided that the children would not be told anything until there was more news.
Next morning, Nicole decided that her children had to be told that there was no word of their father. Both she and Nina were calm and perfectly collected when they arrived at our door; although they had not slept all night, neither their faces nor their bearing betrayed the slightest sign of what they had lived through. Nicole’s voice was grave but unwavering as she spoke to her children about what had happened the day before. I was awed by her courage: it seemed to me that this example of everyday heroism was itself a small victory - if such could be imagined - over the unspeakable horror the city had witnessed the day before.
The children listened with wide-eyed interest, but soon afterwards they went back to their interrupted games. A little later, my son came to me and whispered: “Guess what Dominic’s doing?”
“What?” I said, steeling myself.
“He’s learning to wiggle his ears.”
This was, I realised, how my children - or any children, for that matter - would have responded: turning their attention elsewhere, during the age that would pass before the news began to gain purchase in their minds.
At about noon, we took the children to Fort Greene Park. It was a bright, sunny day and the children were soon absorbed in riding their bicycles and scooters. In the meanwhile, my wife Deborah and I sat on a shaded bench and spoke with Nicole. “An hour passed between the blast and the fall of the building,” she said. “Frank could easily have got out in that time. The only thing I can think of is that he stayed back to help with the evacuation. Nobody knew the building like he did and he must have thought he had to do it.”
Nicole paused. “I think it was only because Frank saw me leave, that he decided that he could stay,” she said. “He knew that I would be safe and the kids would be looked after. That was why he felt he could go back to help the others. He loved the towers and had complete faith in them. Whatever happens, I know that what he did was his own choice.”
- Amitav Ghosh
Vocabulary exercise about After the World Trade Centre
A. Match the words with their definitions/meanings.
Vocabulary Answer
Define the following professionals. One has been done for you.
architect, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, aerospace engineer, automobile engineer, electronic engineer, electrical engineer, computer engineer, food engineer, chemical engineer, biomedical engineer.
Example: An architect is an engineer who designs buildings and advises in their construction.
Answer
Question and answers from the text After the World Trade Centre
Writing Questions and answers
A. Write a description of an event that you have recently witnessed.
Last week I went to see my niece Laxmi’s dance show at her school in Kathmandu. When I got there, the hall was full of parents sitting and waiting eagerly for the program to start. Backstage all the girls were dressed in red and green with sparkling costumes as they got ready to go on stage.
When Laxmi’s group came out, traditional Nepali music began playing. The ten-year-old girls looked nervous at first as they faced the big crowd. But soon they started their dancing confidently. They were doing traditional folk dances from different parts of Nepal. Laxmi was smiling as she swung her arms and moved her feet to the fast beat in perfect time with the other girls. Her many years of dance class after school were showing. Though still young students, they danced like professionals that day.
When they finished all their dances the crowd shouted and clapped loudly. The girls were happy and proud. After the program, Laxmi ran to me with her costume still on. Her cheeks were red and she was out of breath, but her face was glowing. She told me “Did you see me dancing, Auntie?” All the late nights practicing had been worth it for her. I was so delighted to see her talent at such a young age. She is becoming a skilled dancer before my eyes.
B. Human life does not pass as one expects. You might have also gone through different but memorable incidents. Write an essay on 'An Unforgettable Event in my Life' in about 500 words.
One memory from childhood that I will never forget is a family trip we took to Khaptad National Park when I was 11 years old. Getting ready for the two-week camping trek was an adventure before we even left Kathmandu. We had to pack carefully - warm clothes, hiking boots, sleeping bags, food cans, and a stove. My younger brothers and I could hardly sleep, we felt so excited the night before leaving.
I'll never forget the beautiful views all around us as we hiked through the mountains to reach the park. The forests were green, with colorful wildflowers around. Each morning we woke up to big mountain peaks covered in snow standing above our small tent. It made us feel very small! We were surrounded by nature, not buildings and crowds like in the city. During the days we wore backpacks with supplies and climbed up steep hills for hours. My legs hurt badly at the end of each day. But reaching our next campsite was worth feeling tired.
One afternoon we found a gorgeous, peaceful waterfall in the forest. We ate our lunch sitting on large rocks as the water crashed down next to us. I still remember the sweet, fresh air, so different from Kathmandu’s smog. When the sunset, the sky filled with pink and orange. It seemed magical.
Our final destination was Khaptad Baba, a religious place over 3,300 meters high. I'd never been so high before! Seeing the old temple there was awesome - prayer flags blew between ancient trees beside engraved scripture stones. We offered our prayers as smoke and flames mixed with clouds drifting high above.
It wasn't easy. Rains flooded our tent once. We started to run out of food. But overcoming problems together made home comforts feel even sweeter when we returned. Living simply in nature far away for weeks taught me to be able to adapt and get by. Most of all, I felt closer to my family - chatting over dinner, putting up tents side-by-side, and inventing songs to pass the time hiking uphill together. Over ten years later, I still think back on that trip with deep happiness and gratitude.