Skip to main content

Energy Source

I am in New York for a few days. The Uber driver is newly-arrived from Bangladesh and he senses a certain Bangla vibe about me. He wants to strike a conversation but I am too pre-occupied to engage. Even though I feel mildly guilty about it - the guy is not much older than J and looks quite homesick, we ride in silence for almost an hour. It is early on a Saturday morning but the traffic is still not easy. Each time I am here, I want to reach out and find that magic of the first time. I remember seeing the iconic Manhattan skyline with my brand new to America eyes. It has never been the same since the towers fell. And the magic has retreated in degrees over time. Back in my childhood I had once read a quote that New York City is like a beautiful lady smoking a cigar. Upon first seeing the city, I tried to interpret what that may have meant and realized that the viewer's state of mind has the answer to that question. This trip, I spent a good amount of time in the subways - a place where the magic is least apparent. 

The hotel was full of summertime tourists - their bags filling up the lobby. It is quicker to climb eights flights of stairs than take the elevator. Through everything is the moist heat that sits in place. I get bit by mosquitoes while in a coffee shop. Things don't work - doors, knobs, handles, faucets and so on. You need to look beyond those things, focus on what matters. When I was younger and newer to the country, it was so easy for me to zone into the "what matters" - that the manic energy of New York - the thing to soak in and charge your batteries with. It was for ideas and inspiration. You were meant to return to where you came from covered with the city's pixie dust. I struggle to find it now - the city has been forever changing so its not about the city. So it must be about me. What does it say about a person who can no longer tap into energy?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more