Cherian Mathai traces his finger through the morning air. There’s the Chase building, he motions. Next to it is a shorter, black building, its top barely visible. His hand waves in the direction above it. "That’s where it was," he says.

We are on a pier on the Brooklyn waterfront, gazing across the East River at the Manhattan skyline. One can at best approximate the location of the Twin Towers now, their height and outline and their massive substance. But those were buildings. Cherian has come to realise that siblings don’t fade to black. "People say time heals. But I feel worse now. The void is being felt as time passes on."

His older brother, Joseph Mathai, 49, was having breakfast at Windows on the World when the towers fell. It was his favourite restaurant. "He liked sushi," says Cherian. "They had good sushi." That morning Joseph had come down from Boston, where he lived with his wife and two children, to attend a financial risk management conference. A managing partner at Cambridge Technology Partners, Joseph was an easygoing man who would have normally gone to the conference a little later, like his four colleagues did, all of whom survived. But Joseph was on time on September 11 because his friend was to deliver the keynote speech.

They found Joseph’s body intact. There were no burn injuries, a fact that continues to confound Cherian. Perhaps, he ventures, he started running downstairs immediately after the plane hit, escaping the flames that eventually consumed the top floors. Joseph’s credit cards and subway pass were undamaged. The police found 61 cents in Joseph’s pockets. Rather than give Cherian the coins, they wrote him a cheque for the amount, Cherian has yet to encash it.

In the ’70s, Cherian and Joseph would spend untold nights walking the streets of New York, going for movies and plays and whiling away their bachelor lives. This September 11, Cherian intends to visit Ground Zero, to lay a flower on the ground. It will be his second visit. "It’s always crowded," he complains. "People are trying to market T-shirts and all sorts of things."

On this side of the water, however, things are quieter. A couple of Chinese tourists take snaps of each other in front of the Brooklyn Bridge before wandering off. We step back to read a Walt Whitman poem etched into the metal railing around the perimeter of the pier. It is entitled Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

Stand up, Tall Masts of Mannahatta!
Stand up, Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, Curious and Baffled Brain!
Throw out questions and answers!