NEW YORK: Jail Singh Chauhan, a pot-bellied and pleasant taxi driver originally from the Indian Punjab, says business has never been as bad as since last month’s terrorist attack here.

“We are dead, sir, we are dead,” he says, speaking for other New York City cabbies who, like him, come from South Asia. The city has 92,000 licensed cab drivers, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Exactly how many are South Asian is not known but they are thought to number in the thousands.

In the weeks since the Sept 11 destruction of the World Trade Centre, the city’s yellow cab fleet has reported a 50 percent fall in profits. “I don’t remember worse times,” sighs Chauhan, a Sikh who wears a turban.

Fares are lost or forgone for reasons both traumatic and cathartic. Some would-be passengers hail Chauhan’s cab only to turn away at the sight of his beard and headdress, which to the untrained eye resemble Osama bin Laden’s. “I can’t change my face just because they don’t like it, right?” he says.

Others hop in and offer him a sympathetic ear. He feels so thankful to some of them for letting him share his feelings that he politely declines payment of the fare.

Chauhan is among hundreds of thousands of South Asians in this city who hope the surge in xenophobia they have felt since Sept 11 will ebb but who fear that paranoia about Arabs and South Asians may harden into a permanent racial barrier.

Fuelling these fears is census data showing that Asian neighbourhoods here an in other large US cities are developing into ghettos characterised by high crime rates, poor schools and health care, and bleak job prospects. Compared to the count ten years ago, the 2000 census found that Asians in large cities were more likely to live apart from other races.

Indians are among the fastest-growing groups in this city. According to the 2000 census, their numbers doubled in a decade to 170,899, second among Asians only to the city’s Chinese population of 361, 531. Koreans are a distant third, with 86, 473.

The numbers of Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants also have risen. Local Nepali organizations claim a population of more than 10,000 people, many from the hardy Sherpa community, but they were not listed as a distinct ethnic group in the 2000 census.

Word of alleged hate crimes reverberates through these communities. Since Sept 11, a Pakistani in Texas and a Sikh in Arizona have been killed. Mosques and Hindu temples have been vandalized. New York police are investigating an attack on a journalist of Pakistani origin.

Often, the main toll on these immigrant communities is more mundane: suspicious looks on the subway, at work or in public parks, and other forms of ostracism that are as pernicious as they may be subtle.

In some cases, however, other communities have rallied to support their Arab and South Asian neighbours: accompanying them to the local shops or to doctors’ appointments, for example, to ease the fear of appearing alone in public.

Within hours of the World Trade Centre attack, municipal authorities here admonished residents not to target the city’s Muslims for retribution and dispatched police to protect mosques and other community centres.

Despite continued police protection, however, fear remains in evidence. Not far from Chauhan’s apartment here. Flushing neighbourhood, attendance at an Afghan mosque has dropped despite the absence of any reported violence there. “Our people feel uncomfortable,” says Mohammed Yusufi, the Imam, “though no one I know has yet been hurt in New York.”

Speaking through an interpreter in the mosque’s windswept front yard, the bespectacled Yusufi says last month’s terrorist attacks have left the community “saddened and this sadness is accompanied by some degree of concern for our brethren in Afghanistan and here.”

In the immediate aftermath of the twin tower collapse, hundreds of Muslims here went into hiding or abandoned traditional garb that would set them apart. Many Sikhs also stopped wearing turbans.

A Pakistani woman recounts her fear in a local newspaper. “When it was announced that the plane hijackers were Arab Muslims,” Humera Manzoor writes, “there was so much panic in our South Asian community that almost nobody was willing to go outside.” Many Muslim women were attacked and their veils pulled down, she says, although before the attacks none had felt the presence of any cultural barrier.

“At schools some kids are beaten up by their fellow classmates who were once their friends,” Manzoor adds. School officials here say attendance has dropped.

Upwards of 650 Pakistanis and Indians are believed to have died at the World Trade Centre, although there is no official tally.

There has been little time for mourning amid fears of backlash and as immigrant businesses went into tailspin. At an Afghan restaurant, the only people present during a recent weekday lunch hour were two waiters. “These are bad times as you can see,” said a Pakistani waiter, pointing to the empty tables.

As massive layoffs take effect all over the recession-hit United States, South Asian businesses say they are being hit hard not only because consumers in general are spending less bu but also because South Asian customers - the bedrock of their business - are staying home.

Some observers warn that the worst could still be ahead as Washington ups the ante with military action in Afghanistan. During the Gulf War, attacks on ethnic groups started after US troops suffered casualties on the ground, recalls Sreenath Srinivassan, a journalism professor at Columbia University. —Dawn/InterPress Service.