On my way to DC yesterday, we passed through NYC – I was on a bus. Off the highway, it took a tortuous 30 minutes or more for the bus to wend its way through to near the Penn Station, where most of these private city-buses operate from. It always does.

It was those 30 minutes or more of driving, of the nearly inhuman patience displayed by the driver, that made me think about my almost unquestioning love for the city.

The one place in the world, I think I have always wanted to be in but could never make happen. It is indeed NYC, followed by Paris and London, and maybe Mumbai, that have made me want to work on cities in some manner or the other. That is another story though.
In front of us in narrow lanes, cars waited patiently for traffic lights to change colors, or pedestrian rivers to cross, mostly punctuated darts that aggregate into higher level fluidities.

In the already clogged arteries, with cars parked neck-to-neck on the curbside, someone chooses to pause, seemingly interminably, to pick up a lady with tons of luggage checking out of a hotel. A gentle honk from the bus driver, and the parked car driver nudges the vehicle a couple of inches, as one watches with awe and anxiety, a masterly display of maneuvering a massive rectangular block of steel through wormholes.

It is me after all, condemned to design think, wondering why and what might be the alternative. In all my years with this city, I have never experienced a time without some kind of construction work being one of the causes of the interruptions. There is always something going on.

I was already tired.

An early morning rising to catch a commuter train, alone on a dark freezing wet platform, and scared when the train finally does arrive but seems will not stop. You needed to be visible to the train driver – but how the heck is one supposed to stop a megaton hulk moving at that speed, because you wave it down? He did stop, but way beyond the platform – the wheels slip on wet rails was the conductor’s explanation.

Anyway, I digress. I was tired. All the squirming in the cramped bus seat, cannot massage one’s muscles enough to excuse anyone – not even the love of one’s life – I thought.

Coming into the city, you think you are jaded for not yielding to the urge to capture its distant skyline on your camera. It seems you have done it a million times before. Others do, and you smile in your mind. That signature skyline she sketches on even grey days is the ultimate architecture of seduction – irresistible.

These are those unfortunate times when the virus has turned us savvy about its microscopic spikes and sites of attachment. But that jagged etch of the city that we want to register is but similar, just hugely macro, is it not? It too has attached itself and infected millions for generations – those who settle and the hordes that transit.

But then it occurred to me – this is it! This is what it means to be NYC. This constant remaking, this endless flow of turbulent encounters. This cultivated rudeness. The superbly efficient, accented warmth and lilt of the shawarma-cart vendor’s speech.

That beauty and its darker side, live side by side on the keyboards of this giant musical instrument – life at another scale. There is no, lets have more of the beautiful and less of the narrow graffiti-filled alleyways, or that garbage waiting to be picked on the sidewalks – it is all together now.

Love is the real test of citizenship. All those T-shirts with the “I heart NY” – are fundamentally wrong – They should read something like – The City made me a Lover!

Graffitti, it occurred to me is indeed the sign of life – it is what says, there is a vibrant vitality to this place , an underbelly rumbling in song – for without it no place is really worth being in love with like this.

I forgot my jacket on the bus when I stepped out to get a sandwich from my favorite corner vendor outside Penn Station. I knew what to order. I was freezing and relieved to be back on the bus.

Another kind of humanity trickled in to fill the voids left behind by the Bostonians who had alighted – garrulous and joyful. (There are things I wonder about – just cannot muster the courage that one needs to write with any authenticity. One thing though – why so many Asians in the bus business – why do so many Asians use buses?).

The clouds today were something else altogether – I know not the words but there was something irreverent about their representations of turbulence – ruffling the heart, feathery and wispy at the edges.

Something I read on someone’s post earlier, made me think, there are only so many clocks we can cut out of clouds. We have got to let them clouds be.