The only time I was in the United States - that was in the summer of 1991 - I made a three day stopover in New York on my way back home. I put up with an Indian friend who was then a medical intern in a city hospital. The apartment was on West 42nd Street, I think, or maybe 62nd (these are the kind of details I am beginning to forget now), very close to Central Park. My friend's idea of showing me round the Big Apple was to take me by subway to Jackson Heights: the unique aroma of incense mixed with stale urine and paan hanging heavily in the air told you from far away that it was the Indian enclave. He was eager to show me the shops and the temples, where lots of well-heeled Indians had made large endowments: golden idols, heavy jewellery, marble filigree work, that sort of thing. It was on my persuasion that he agreed to visit places like the Guggenheim Museum and Broadway and Times Square, and climb to the top of the Empire State Building (if I had known what was going to happen to the World Trade Center in a decade's time, I might have chosen to visit one of the Twin Towers instead).
It was later on, over mugs of beer on the last evening, that my friend sheepishly admitted that though he had lived in New York for four years, he'd probably never have seen the sights had it not been for my visit...
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This one brought in a rather blazing wind of mixed emotions Suvro da when I found it some minutes after waking up in the morning, and it came filled with unseen but sensed sights and sounds and images. I’ll try very hard not to write a terribly long comment (probably write a blogpost instead…).
In 1991 when you’d come here, I was sure you’d come here for three years. Maybe it’s because you traveled so much and saw so much. I’ve never known of anybody else who traveled as much as you did in the time you were here, which is why I sometimes can’t help wishing that you’d come here instead of somebody else I know but don’t want to always know.
That bit about Jackson Heights reminded me of the one time that I’d gone to Devon street (which sometimes gets mispronounced as Diwan street) in Chicago in 2004 Spring. Beth had tempted me with the carrot of classical music (which I'd been listening to a lot that semester on the internet radio even though I didn’t quite become a connoisseur), and we had gone to listen to Piotr Andreszewski play (I am ashamed to say that I’d been only half awake through his performance, and I don’t know how much I actually heard from his playing and how much simply got transformed in my half dazed state of slumber). It had been beautiful but it was very fuzzy. Then there was the unnatural awakening a long time afterwards down that winter-spring street of Devon: the mixed strong smells of Indian food and spices, loud cries and yells and noises and voices, and the street could have been any Indian street. I can no longer remember what we ate there. Beth did try to wheedle me into traveling with her to Colorado that same summer and she showed me lots of pictures and told me what a fascinating car trip it would be – but I just mulishly shook my head, and stayed in my sunken studio apartment painting pictures and writing a story, and taking walks around town during storms and fine weather.
I can’t help smiling about you taking your friend who’d been there for 4 years (!) around the important places in the Big Apple. I always wondered whether you’d gone for a Broadway musical, and I suddenly remembered reading somewhere last year that Times Square was named Tagore Square for one day in 1961 commemorating Tagore’s centennial birth anniversary. I wonder though why your friend hadn’t traveled any within NY. I could almost see you with the mugs of beer and him saying what he did ‘sheepishly’, and you smiling broadly.
I’m glad you wrote this one and I won’t nag you to put up some pictures and write more about that trip but I am hopping on a leg and hoping and praying that I can ask you over for a trip. Then you’d tell me more about that trip maybe.
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