The New York I Saw

It has been two weeks since I returned home, and almost three weeks since I left the restless pulse of New York City. Life’s mundanities have got in the way, so it takes studied effort to recall that I spent eight days in one of the world’s most famous cities. What I remember from my time there is the isolation of a big city and its liberating anonymity. Here, I am an ageing, unmarried woman, wasting away my life in frivolities. There, I was free, single & young – with the streets of New York thrown open to me with exciting possibilities. The days were lonely, but serene. Work was busy, the skyscrapers distracting. In between were the truly exciting things – an imperfect, dirty, dark city full of promises. I lived not like a tourist, but like a working class New Yorker – a subway commute to work from a rented home, a quick packed lunch, walking the streets to see this and that, and eventually joining a homebound crowd. I shopped for my groceries in Whole Foods and bemoaned the high prices. I learnt to carry an umbrella, rain or shine. I looked at the grey clouds, shrugged at the wind, and went about my way, sidestepping the ever-present litter and puddles.

My friends insisted that I was there at the perfect time. The preciously short Goldilocks time of the year, when it is not too hot, not too cold. When there is enough kick in the wind that it plays with your hair, but not fierce enough to sweep you off your feet. Yet, New York showed me all her moods – the sun glinting gleefully off the omnipresent glass windows, the pure white snow clouds in a pristine blue sky, the miserably wet roads after cold rains, and the brooding grey that gives its nature to the famed “New York” filter in Instagram.

It will be easy to give an account of all that I saw there through a rote itinerary of tourist spots. But it would be a disservice to my experience and to the city for it to be reduced to a list-of-things-I-saw. Despite its inequitable wealth, skyline & history, at the end of the day, New York is a city of its common people. It gets its lifeblood from its subways, from the hustlers trying to make a buck, from its love of the arts & performances & music. It is in the smell wafting from the halal carts, in the steam rising through the vents, in its glaring neon LED lights, and in the noise that does not wane with the passing of daylight.

Surprisingly, the one thing that keeps coming back to me is the subways. I have used other subways before, in Paris, in Tokyo, and even in my hometown of Bangalore. But there is something about the New York subway that feels different.
The tracks and tunnels are narrower than Paris, darker. A siren’s song, beckoning you into the deep Earth. They are almost always grimy, decades of solidified dirt homing in and settling in their final place of rest. And no one seems interested in disturbing this arrangement.
There is also something in the air, a heaviness that indicates it is coming up to you from the pits below, not from the doors outside in. It is inside out, like the winds are carrying messages from some unknown life below the tracks.
Or it could be that I am influenced by what I have read – books like Relic and Reliquary have forever immortalized the New York underground.
It doesn’t help that there are sometimes different levels to the subway here – tracks running below one another. The first time I heard a train going over my head is etched in my memory. Had I attempted an ungracious little jump, I would have felt the thundering roof through my fingertips. Then a train went by on my left, and one more on my right. With three speeding trains surrounding me, the reverberations make it seem as though you are enswathed in an earthquake. The air shakes. The ground shakes. And so does your heart.
My friends warned me not to nap on these commutes. This advice turned out to be unnecessary. Even when exhausted with my feet ready to give up, I found I was unable to shut my eyes. There is always a whiff of fascination, intrigue & danger in these carriages – it could be from the musician lugging about his instruments on his way to the next show, from the colourfully dressed gang of teenagers looking ready to burn the world to ashes, or from the ever-present, drugged, highly strung, convulsing homeless guy. Life and danger always go hand in hand.

Between the subways and the walks, there are the buildings. Miles high and touching the sky, old and new, built next to each other without a hair’s breadth space between them, they give the city its iconic skyline. Beyond the famous Empire State, Chrysler, Vanderbilt & Rockefeller, there are many nameless, familiar buildings that always manage to catch one’s eye. You might spot a beautifully aged-brick tower next to an imposing wall of cement & glass – both equally striking. In all honesty, I had fully expected to dislike the concrete-park aspect of the city. I did not. With a neck always craned to spot as many of the delightful Art Deco elements I could, I happily walked the streets, always distracted. I will always remember my strolls in Greenwich for the constantly charming building (be it tens of stories tall or even the modest 4 storey residential apartment) it threw out for me to admire.

Apart from the streets and the subways, a large part of the greatness of New York stems from its diversity. In my eight days there, I heard close to eighty languages. The people all look different but are unified by their choice of black and grey-hued clothes. It is this multiplicity that assures an immigrant they can belong here; New York will always budge a little and make space for you to squeeze in. This struck me all the more when I was rambling inside Chelsea Market and a black man named Salim called me over. My astonishment only grew when he started conversing with me in Hindi. It was benignly humourous when I could not keep up with his near perfect diction and vocabulary of a language from my homeland. I definitely had a smile for the rest of the day after that.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way looking at this city through rose coloured lenses. With all its grime, relentless blare of police sirens, extreme weather, exorbitant costs, dicey neighborhoods, dense population – it is impossible to. But it also has so much more.

One of the things that touched me overwhelmingly was my visit to the Grand Central Terminal. The Dear New York exhibition by Humans of New York had taken over the station and turned it into a showcase of portraits and stories of common New Yorkers. One section had framed portraits, photographs taken by children of their heroes from their communities. This hammered in how the arts is central to the city, with public places frequently thrown open to celebrate it. You can find it in the jazz bars where the blues are revered every night, in the impromptu orchestras you hear in the parks, in the underground cult comedy clubs that are always booked out, in the numerous galleries celebrating artists both local and world-renowned, and in the theatres on Broadway and beyond. And if you are not into any of these things, the city still has something left to offer. There ain’t no party in the world like a New York party.

Once I returned home, many asked me what I thought of my time there. I fumbled, only managed an ineffectual “Oh, I enjoyed it!” or “It was so nice!”. I was thrown by these questions because I was inept at summing up my experience in a sentence. I had to unpack it, day by day, memory by memory. I know it is impossible to see everything the city has to offer in eight short days. But it has a way of making you believe you can fathom its depth. I have taken the cavernous subways, walked up and down its interminable steps till my feet ached, till it felt like I lived there. I know that there are doors I have left unopened, sides of the city I have not seen (Harlem, I hear your call). There is the dissatisfaction of fleeting time, of having missed something just when it was in my grasp. I wish with all my heart that I get to visit it again.

I thought I would love New York for its heritage, its history, its nightlife. I ended up loving it for its edge, its twinkling dusk, its darkness. I loved it because it was so real.