Zafar Khan expects the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to be a day of deep reflection.

He won’t need the commemorative editions of newspapers and magazines or the slew of TV specials to help him reconnect emotionally to the tragic events. When he looks back on this most memorable year, he will recall a time when being a Muslim made him the enemy in the eyes of the hate-filled few, and a time when the kind-hearted many showed him and his family more compassion and support than they could have imagined in one small community.

“We had a rough time,” Khan said recently from his home in Bangor. “Our emotions will be very mixed on the anniversary. There was grief and sadness and fear, but there was so much love and respect, too, and that will make us grateful forever.”

Khan and his family, who run the Bahaar Pakistani restaurant in downtown Bangor, never really got to feel that comforting distance that most Maine people eventually enjoyed in the months after 9-11. On that historic Tuesday, the family closed the restaurant early – “Due to tragedy,” the sign in the window explained.

Like the rest of us, the Khans were thoroughly absorbed in the horrific events that unfolded on TV throughout the day. They ignored the car horns that honked in passing, unaware of their hostile intent.

At the restaurant the next day, however, the Khans no longer could ignore the angry horns. The taunts had begun, too, from bigots who told the family to go back where they came from, who shouted obscenities at them, who called them baby killers because they happened to share the same faith – in name, at least – with the terrorists who had murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.

On Sept. 15, when a man came into the restaurant and threatened to harm the Khans, the family experienced a fear that the rest of us never had to confront.

“Before this, we used to go out freely at night, anywhere we liked,” said Khan, the 30-year-old brother-in-law of Noor Khan, the restaurant’s owner. “But after September 11, I didn’t go out after dark for three months. We thought anything could happen, and we worried about the kids in the family. We didn’t expect the threats, of course, or the hateful people.”

Neither did Khan expect what happened next, as more people in the area began to learn of the injustice against one of their own. The letters of support, hundreds of them, began pouring in to the restaurant. Strangers sent flowers and money to the Khans, invited them to their Thanksgiving dinners, left their telephone numbers behind, and even offered to take the anxious family into their homes.

One of Bangor’s Jewish congregations invited Noor Kahn, a Muslim and an American citizen, to join in a New Year’s ceremony that involved the tossing of bread into the Kenduskeag Stream to symbolize the casting off of sin.

“Bangor had been a special place to us before this,” said Khan, who joined the family business four years ago after studying in London. “But the sympathy and love the people gave us in those bad times made us feel secure and confident again. They treated us not as Pakistanis or Muslims but just as neighbors in their town. On the anniversary I will think about the families of the victims, and about our family here and in Pakistan. And I will think about what makes Bangor such a good place to live.”