I was 13 when I first met New York. It was when we lived briefly in the United States, I was a snotty, spotty adolescent with so many chips on my rounded shoulders that I could have made an entire motel complex of log cabins out of them, and I hated everything from my own life to my parents to school to the idea of going back to India to the shape of the planet. But in a strange kind of way I missed home, missed the high-octane pollution and the constant honking of traffic and the throngs of pedestrians that chose roads over sidewalks to stroll about on. In the suburban Maryland enclave that we called home, excitement was the latest moon landing and an event was getting my ears pierced at the local mall.
So when my parents took me to the big, bad, beautiful city that was New York, I was in heaven. It looked right, with its towering, reflective sky-scrapers and billboards glinting myriad neon. It smelled right, with the sharp pong of exhaust and the constant waft of fish-tinged ozone. It sounded right, with the blare of car horns and the clack of the buses changing overhead traction, the clamour of passing stereos and the steady undertone of human voices. And it felt right, with its energy, its spirit and its anonymity. It was so much like home and it felt as if it could become one for me.
We stayed in a hotel not too far from the centre of the city and walked around every day that we spent there. There was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a place bigger than even the Louvre, which had been the biggest collation of art that I had experienced until then. There was the Guggenheim, that fantastically sculptural home to art that had been when it was created and still was radical when I saw it then…and is even today. And then there were the bits and pieces of heart and soul that were scattered all over the city, from the fountains in Rockefeller Plaza to the stained glass windows of the Lincoln Center to the galleries that marched along the main streets.
And then there was the food. I was taken to eat kosher at a Jewish deli and met pastrami on rye for the first time, the stuff that Mother had told me so much about for so long. I saw a bagel for the first time and wondered how the filling managed to avoid the hole, but then decided that a hole-full of cream cheese was the closest thing to bliss that was edible. I also ate my way through a classic New York City hot dog, a few bites of divinity that left me with a life-strong passion for the wiener blanketed with mustard and relish that endures even today. And, of course, there was the NYC fries, served up in a paper cone and bathed in anything from molten cheese to Thousand Island dressing to chilli.
When I was older and wiser and less naïve, I went back to the city that gave me a life when I believed I had none. It was the same magic, one that I could channel to rejuvenate with just one deep inhalation. The magic made my face come alive, a friend told me, watching as a winter-long spell of low blueness instantly brightened into the warm bloom of a golden summer of the mood. I enjoyed walks around Saks, Bloomingdales and Tiffany as much as I did wanderings through MOMA and Radio City Music Hall. I shopped for books at Barnes and Noble and listened to concerts at the Madison Square Garden. And I ate pretzels and sushi, blinis and piroshkis, blue cotton candy at the Bronx Zoo and sour pickles at Fulton Fish Market. And the classic New York City hot dog.
It is a city I still want to live in some day. But for now, I have been there, done some of that and, yes, even have the T-Shirt!
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