bottledworder

The crowds of New York aren’t for everyone. Even for me, who grew up in India in one of its most crowded cities, New York can be overwhelming.

Out of all these crowded spaces, Penn Station is one of New York’s most crowded where people can simply inundate you.

Crowds move in the city. Yet, what is striking about Penn Station crowds is that the movement of people is not haphazard. People move very purposefully once they are subsumed in the flows, as if assigned by some invisible hand to this little eddy or that which then swells into huge rivers of people. At any given moment, especially during rush hour, huge numbers of people swarm about in these directional eddies, or are stationary in strategic parts or simply flow in parallel lines, sometimes in the same but often in opposite directions side by side. People are rarely out of pace, except when they have to pass through heavy doors or climb up stairs with people already sitting on them.

There are all kinds of people in the crowds. The young office goer eager to please in formal wear, the group of young girls in summer dressed out to roam the city in the hot sun, the middle-aged lady determined to find the sales in the stores, the student reading while walking to catch the subway to college (yes, believe me, reading and walking!), elderly couples revisiting the city they used to live in, airport and long-distance train and bus riders rushing with their luggage and tourists completely confused or overly focused on their maps moving through.

As I come up from the subterranean platform where the train opens onto the relatively open spaces of the upper level this morning, I suddenly notice a young girl of about three or four walking with her mom. She has a lot to say. I can only hear snippets of her conversation as I move along the eddy right next to them. She is obviously excited and quite undeterred by our sudden emergence into the crowds from the relative quietness of the interior of the air-conditioned train.

“I like to eat tacos. I can eat a whole taco,” she says as she passes a Mexican restaurant on the platform that advertises hand-rolled tortillas.

“I don’t like cinnamon.” This, as she passes Cinnabon.

“Oh, we can shine our shoes,” she says as she passes the overpriced and extremely expensive shoe repair shop which obviously finds customers even in this economy.

I wait to see what she will do next. I know that we are about to pass the donut shop with its full display of donuts facing our eddies. I know because I pass this way every day.

She tugs her mother’s hand and disrupts the eddy for a bit as she points at the glass display. “I can eat some donuts, mom.”

The thing about people-eddies is that you accompany people for just a few minutes. It’s like a mini/ micro journey where you don’t know where you all came from or where you all will end up. You may have started at Track No. 2 and may be moving through the flight of steps that leads to the bank of ticket machines and then up the escalators to the exit at 7^th and 33^rd. Even within this stream, some of you may become a distributary at the foot of the escalator and move to the full exit and some may move towards the indoor subway entrance with the practiced movement of a Zombie. Everyone is together for a few minutes and then you will never see each other again.

Yet, these few moments are enough to take me back to familiar places from the past. The little girl walking with her mom is me. The station is not Penn but Sealdah station in Kolkata. The eddies are pretty much the same. The expressions on people’s faces are roughly similar. In a very chaotic city, the station eddies, strangely, are moving in equally organized streams because when large amounts of people are together, they find the direction of most efficient flow unless disturbed!

I’m walking with my mom who is returning with me after my dance lesson to which I have obviously gone only because of the attractions on the way back.

“There’s the vegetable chops behind the glass display freshly fried,” I’m saying as I point to our Kolkata vegetable croquettes sold in the mornings and evenings in the shop windows lining the footpaths.

“I could eat two whole cakes today,” I say, as I point to wax-paper wrapped sweet confectionery with candied red bits that went for cherries in my girlhood in my city, where real cherries didn’t grow then in the tropical climate.

“I don’t like kathal,” I say as I point to the fruit sellers selling ripe jackfruit with the heavy smell of summer.

“Oh, I need to polish my shoes for school tomorrow,” I say as I pass the shoe-shine boys who wait in clusters outside the tarpaulin-covered hawker stores.

A few minutes of contact are enough in the crowds to find a collage of memories to sweep you up. At Penn, mom and kid go their way as I go mine. I know I’ll never see the little girl and her mom again.

I know that it’s been almost five years now since my own mom only lives in my memory. I know that I shall never see my mom again.

Yet, just for a little bit, I got to hold her hand this morning. Perhaps decades from now, in another place, in another country, at another station, another little girl will walk with her mom and point to some other little delicacy. Perhaps my little girl of today, then a woman, will find a little bit of happiness in that moment in an eddie next to her little girl in the crowd.