MEMORIES OF A NIGHTMARE: Samyuktha (extreme right) with her traumatised family

Who is a terrorist? In jittery, nerves-frazzled New York, post September 11, just about anyone who is brown and acting "suspiciously"—never mind that the word is vague and encompasses a variety of behaviours.

The latest to get the "terrorist" label were unlikely candidates: petite Malayalam actress Samyuktha Verma, her parents and 16-year-old sister along with comedian Jayaraj Warrior and singer Biju Narayanan. The group was flying from Dallas to New York via Chicago on the next leg of their US tour.

As the plane began its descent into New York around 10.45 p.m. the group, in rows of three, began admiring the first views of the city's glittering skyline, swapping positions to take advantage of the two window seats, talking excitedly and gesturing.

STAR CROSSED: Actor Kamal Hasan was reportedly prevented from boarding a flight from Toronto to Los Angeles in April for his "Islamic-sounding" name

A fellow passenger alerted the flight attendant to the suspicious behaviour of seven passengers who were talking in a strange language, changing seats and pointing at landmarks from the window. Soon two military jets were escorting the plane into LaGuardia Airport, where Verma's group and another Indian who wasn't even its part were escorted for a grilling by the airport police, members of the police department and the FBI. They were released at 4 in the morning.

BAD NOTES: Singer Shubha Mudgal and her husband were detained for almost an hour at Hong Kong airport last November

Not the usual treatment for a movie star. "They had never seen so many police except in the movies-there were over 50 armed police officers!" recalls C. Vijayan, the New Jersey promoter of the show, who was there for the interrogation. "The group never created a problem in the plane, they were just laughing and singing."

He believes, as do many of the fans he spoke to later, that it had to do with the way they looked. "There were 98 people on the plane. The most telling thing is our group was of six people, and there was another Indian travelling on the plane who had nothing to do with this group and was taken into custody too," says Vijayan.

Controversy

A GUEST ILL TREATED MOVING ON: Sethi prefers to forget the past Cultural acolyte Rajeev Sethi is among the most unlikely individuals to match a potential terrorist profile. Yet, last month, the affable Sethi was picked up by the police outside the Pentagon-nucleus of the United States defence operations-handcuffed and kept in the confines of the back seat of a squad car for over three hours. It all began when Sethi, chauffeured by a friend, landed at the Pentagon to locate the informal memorial that has come up on its compound. Sethi, who was in Washington to launch the Silk Road festival sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum, in a fit of creative zest decided that the memorial would form an ideal location for putting up an exhibit on the Tree of Life. Unable to locate the site, Sethi approached a marine on guard for help. The officer while denying any knowledge asked Sethi for identification. As luck would have it, the identity card issued by the Smithsonian Museum did not match with the records on the police computer data network. Failing that, Sethi was unceremoniously handcuffed behind his back and locked into the back seat of a squad car. His entreaties to make a phone call to his hosts, the United States State Department, were ignored. It was only after sleuths from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived and grilled Sethi, was it realised that there had been a mistake. The trauma was relived a few days later when Sethi had to field a question from a caller during a live phone-in programme on the National Public Radio. Apprehensive that any unwarranted scandal could sabotage the exhibition, which Sethi was billing as a design entrepreneurship venture for India, he sidestepped the query, but not before the news was picked up by the Washington Post. Sethi himself, presumably mindful of slighting his otherwise generous hosts, refrained from commenting on the entire episode. Losing a battle to win a war? -Anil Padmanabhan

Ravi Verma, Samyuktha's father, wants to dismiss the episode as a bad dream. "We never knew what was happening. This kind of a welcome can shock anybody," he says and admits that the airline overreacted. However, he has also received calls from concerned New Yorkers apologising for what had happened to them.

This is certainly not the first case of a celebrity being treated like a persona non grata. Actors Kamal Hasan and Aamir Khan, and singer Shubha Mudgal had also been detained and questioned at airports post September 11. According to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, fighter planes have been engaged over 400 times since September 11 to assist civilian flights. The media has also reported about several cases of "terrorist-looking" men being pulled off planes, including a Pakistani-American who was on his way to his home country for a family wedding.

Bharat Jotwani, a New York-based promoter who brings in scores of stars from Bollywood, says that while performers have sometimes been asked to open up their bags in customs, they have had no other problems. "This was an extreme overreaction by the airlines," he says. "It was definitely bad judgment on their part ... I see a clear trend of on-board discrimination against certain people and it could happen to any one of us. There should be a huge apology coming from them. "

It doesn't seem likely. "The police said sorry but nothing else so far," says Jacob Roy, publisher of Malayalampathram, who co-sponsored the trip by Verma's group. A spokesperson for American Trans Air refused to comment on the Verma incident but said that the airline was only doing everything it could to promote passenger safety.

Deepa Iyer, a board member of the South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow and the producer of a video on hate crimes, believes that while earlier the visibly identifiable Sikhs and Muslims were being scrutinised, "now it's gone from religious expression to the colour of one's skin. It seems the criteria for profiling keeps getting larger and more expansive."

While cases involving celebrities make it into the news, the larger story about the hundreds of ordinary immigrants being subjected to racial profiling does not get the same exposure.

"We as a community have to really call on the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation to make sure that sound heads prevail," says Parag Khandhar, assistant director of policy and planning at the Asian American Federation of New York. "The government and a lot of the mainstream media are also partially to be blamed for this constant state of national emergency that we seem to be in. It has everybody looking for the next big catastrophe."

For Verma and her group, New York seems to have proved unlucky. While she and the troupe were performing in Boston, her family went out to a small Indian eatery in Manhattan where her mother's handbag got stolen. It contained cash, passports and all the airline tickets.

And they still have to fly the unfriendly skies back to India.