Take any word, scramble the letters and pose it to seven-year-old Amish, and he will decipher it. This he does without the aid of pen and paper. All Amish needs is the motivation. "Ammu, I-I-O-O-A-N-M-F-R-T," his father, Kumar Sattaluri, reads the letters off a newspaper.

Amish pretends not to hear his father, and walks over to a stack of toys in the living room, then changes his mind to run into the kitchen for ice-cream. Kumar repeats the letters, and when that doesn’t elicit a response, he resorts to the ultimate bargaining chip of the American parent. "You tell me this, and I’ll give you Chicken Nuggets for dinner." Without pause, Amish responds correctly, "Information."

Amish’s mother Deepika was a 33-year-old Wipro accountant who worked for Marsh McLennan on the 92nd floor of the first tower. Before his mother died, Amish’s grades were outstanding. At the age of four he was completing crossword puzzles and solving mathematical problems meant for nine-year-olds.

Post-September 11, he stopped reading, failed all his classes and rapidly lost weight. He finally started seeing a psychiatrist, who placed him on medication, and meeting with a therapist, Joan. The two talk and play games like checkers. Kumar checks to see the time. They have a seven o’clock appointment with Joan today, he reminds his son.

"Oh, I thought it was on the 26th," says Amish.

To see what Amish looked like before his weight loss, you only have to glance up at the walls of the Sattaluri home. An image of Amish with his mother lies just inside the entrance to the apartment. Deepika, smiling, stands behind a chubby Amish who’s sitting in front of his birthday cake. The same image is stuck to the wall of the living room, to a sliding glass door that leads to the balcony, and pasted on a kitchen cabinet. The photo is of Amish celebrating his seventh birthday, just two weeks before the attacks on the WTC. It was ostensibly the last occasion the family celebrated before their world came crashing down.

This time round, Amish’s birthday is a small matter of debate between father and son. Kumar quietly refuses Amish’s repeated requests for a party. He doesn’t need to explain why—Amish obviously knows the territory well.

The phone rings, and Amish rushes to pick it up. It’s another survivor, someone who lost her husband. The survivor network has for some become a surrogate family, often meeting and spending time together. "We don’t need to say anything," says Kumar, taking the phone from his son’s hands.

Ultimately, we hear, Kumar relented to the pressure of other survivors. Amish had his birthday party on August 24.