New York Stories

I don't mean to sound racist, but you must have seen Asian men in red hats and beige shorts that show off their legs, balancing heavy backpacks and expensive digital SLR's, snapping their better halves in front of every building in every city. I didn't want to be that guy (yeah, I am technically Asian too!) on this trip to New York. So, the camera didn't make it along with the laptop and the boxers (I travel light).

The weather was playing spoilsport as I landed, and especially because I had a few hours to kill in the real part of the city - the streets. However, by now conditioned to the sunniness and generally awesome California weather, I welcomed the smell of the wet earth, though you would probably argue that it was psychological since an urban center like New York is a 100% cement. As usual everyone was in a hurry, running away from the rain, leaving me like that sole upholder of contrast.

The unusual warmth at least allowed me to gorge down "to go" sandwiches from a brown paper bag, perched on unknown steps to an unknown residential building, shared with an unknown saleswoman from an unknown roadside store. I couldn't have been farther away from an almost laidback Sunday brunch later that weekend, in a greenhouse that had been converted to a pretty pink dollhouse in Central Park, with the rain pelting the glass walls like a little boy throwing stones to gain his parents' attention, or from Mr. Walker providing shelter from loud trippy techno, or the best cheese pizza I have ever had, in a trendy, almost Baroquian Manhattan apartment at 4 in the morning - like Merril Streep in the Bridges of Madison County - large and simple.

After some pretty decent Turkish coffee in the Village over a conversation spanning topics as diverse as Dubai's construction horizon to Italian neorealist cinema, I smoked my migrane out with sheesha accompanied by some instantly made friends. Spent the night or should I say, next morning, on an alien couch, too fatigued to fear the two canine beings pouncing around. It's fun when you aren't the weakest link though. Now I understand the humor my friends derive from watching me squirm at all the neighbors' dogs. Some of my new friends made me look like The Dog Whisperer and I guffawed till sunrise. Good thing I don't believe in Karma.

Manhattanians are inflicted by this manic virus called the Haute Couteur. Its everywhere you go within the confines of that island of fashion. The first evening I felt like a bum dressed in my black Led Zeppelin t-shirt and khakis. It was seven or eight finely dressed urban men and women, looking like they were the Godchildren of Giorgio Armani and me, going places, ordering stuff, consuming them, breathing in, breathing out, chitchatting, existing. Thank God I had worn shoes on this trip. Weather permitting, I usually prefer my floaters since they offer the lazy prospect of not wearing socks.

Times Square is a wonderland for a lighting nerd. The different colors, different temperatures, different intensities, different heights, different angles, light reflecting off the million Eastern European tourists milling about loudly arguing over maps, off the tops of those brightly colored jaundice cabs, off the carts of roadside sheesh kabab sellers, off the creatively adorned cycle rickshaws (it is an interesting sensation watching an obviously educated young man about town pulling those things, fighting the initial involuntary reaction of sympathy that welles up from growing up in Calcutta). That to me is the picture of New York. I don't really care that people dress normally in Queens or the Bronx, or that you can take romantic ferry rides to Ellis Island, or go watch the Yankees on a hot summer day. That sums up the visual energy of the place - dispelling physical loneliness far west, promising you an unending supply of bodies and their involuntary warmth at any hour of the night.