Day in the city

My seat companion on the bus from Binghamton to New York City whispers, “Half the other passengers are ex-cons!” There’s a big “correction facility” near Binghamton. She told me how to identify recently released prisoners. “They’re starin’ out the windows, they’re jumpin’ off the bus at every stop and they’ve got all their stuff in one big bag.” It’s true. The women sport inch-long nails and flashy clothes. The men are heavily tattooed. I’m dying to turn around and ask questions, but I don’t. Ex-cons, more than the rest of us, need their privacy.

In New York, I get off at Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and take the subway to Jackson Heights in the East. It’s a multi-ethnic neighbourhood where ladies wearing twinkling dupattas walk alongside ladies in billowing black burkhas. I get to the apartment building where a dear friend from Mumbai is visiting her daughter. After a leisurely lunch and tea, I leave at six to ride on the Long Island Rail Road, with its double-decker carriages and $7 tickets. Forty minutes later I get off at Mineola to stay with friends who are long-time US residents, both doctors, both originally from Tamil Nadu. They are wonderful hosts. For dinner there’s three kinds of rice, plus sambar, two veggie curries and curried salmon, with alfalfa-sprout salad and delicious sour-cream instead of dahi. Yum.

The next day I return to Manhattan to meet with a pair of nuclear physicists. She’s English, he’s Indian. They met and married in Bombay when I was a struggling cartoonist and they were PhD students. Now they live in the UK and Europe, so we rarely meet. We stroll in Central Park talking continuously. Alongside us there are break-dance performers, summer brides in frothing white lace and vast fleets of cyclists. We applaud a young Bengali who creates 10-foot-long bubbles using a bucket of bubble-mixture and heavy cotton cord, while his brother operates an ice-cream cart. After lunch we visit a wonderful show of Paul Gauguin’s wood-cuts, paintings and carvings at the Museum of Modern Art.

The following day is Tamil New Year, so I go with my Long Island friends to the local temple. I am uncomfortable with organised religion, but the temple is very well maintained. All the deities look well-dressed, smiling in their glass cases. I tell myself that it’s really only another kind of the Museum, with Faith instead of Art as its focus. Afterwards we go downstairs to the excellent canteen. Then it’s Monday and time to leave. On a single subway fare, I travel right across the city, going West and North, all the way to Riverside, to stay with an art dealer friend and her very friendly cat, Blu. She is chic and blonde and her apartment is full of amazements: 10-foot tall Chinese porcelain vases, ornate bronze birdcages, African masks. We talk nonstop! For two days!

Then it’s time for me to leave once more, by subway and bus. Eight hours later I’m back in Elsewhere. Five pounds heavier, tired and sleepy, happy to be home.

Manjula Padmanabhana, author and artist, tells us tales of her parallel life in Elsewhere USA, in this fortnightly series.

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