My Dear Beloved City,
This is the most essential matter of the utmost importance which I must do. I must say goodbye to you, as I am packing my bags to leave tomorrow morning. With no extra cash in my pockets and a rather abused credit card, I’m returning to what I call a temporary home. All my books, paintings and sculptures have been safely and securely packed and filled up the car to the last inch. However, let’s take a step back and tell you a bit about me and my love for you before I leave.
Let me pretend for a moment that I’m Ismael or Sindbad the sailor. Once upon a time, I built a tiny little boat with my amateur hands just like a bird making its nest in the hidden corner of a tree. I sailed my boat from a faraway land, the Bay of Bengal. Ever since then, it has wandered, lost and found many different right and wrong ways. We voyaged into the distant shores far removed from the spectator’s eye. The radar of my sail was frozen stiff, and I had coasted for years. During that time, I heard the melodies of silence and learned the cost of freedom of my own time. After years of contemplation, the first time I sailed and stepped into New York was in 2019 just before the pandemic started. I came here to learn how to paint or should I say, I sailed in quest for my wildest dream. The dream that everyone including myself at one point thought naïve and childish. However, with an ample amount of doubt, double the amount of fear and my entire life savings I managed to arrive on your shore just like thousands of immigrants do every day.
As bad as the living conditions are in New York I was mesmerized by the aptitude of the human mind and what its fortitude can accomplish. I have wondered about your streets with friends and a lover to witness the architecture, admire the history, or simply be a spectator. The old red brick building and the small corner pizza shops have their own kind of charm. The sunset boat ride that goes under the Brooklyn Bridge around the Statue of Liberty. In the mid-June sweltering heat, I was sitting on that boat with a very special human. I watched the sun go behind the cityscape slowly and saw the reflection in his eyes. I have never been the one who claims to be able to articulate the full and proper definition of beauty, that probably is one of the reasons I am a painter and a sculptor. I suffer from a great deficiency of words. Nevertheless, I felt beauty that day indescribable, unpaintable, uncapturable beauty. It was in the Manhattan sky as well as in his laughter.
The practical difficulties of finding a place to live here are challenging and it’s getting harder every day. If safety, affordability and time efficiency are the requirements for an apartment hunt then you are looking for a jackpot which you may never win. Notwithstanding, the possibility depends on the strata that an individual comes from. New Yorkers often wear this thick veil of bluntness in the name of privacy, everyone minds their own business and lives their own stories. However, the closer that I look, the clearer it reads as loneliness. Especially in the subways, there are more and more people with vacant eyes and a tiresome pace. They fill these cardboard boxes made to call home with their hopes, dreams and triumphs over mini battles called city life. Humans are forever strangers to other humans that have lived just next door for years. Even though, at times it often felt like freedom to me. You step out of your apartment, and you can be anyone without bearing the burden of society’s expectations. As E B White wrote in his essay Here is New York “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation”. It is one of your main attributes. However, If an individual wants to bury their solitude and fill it up with the hysteria of experiencing more, New York has constellations of ventures going on to entertain whether it is waterfront, parks, lights or chaos of noise. If you ever wandered into Times Square or the financial district in lower Manhattan, take a closer look at every human around you from a third person’s perspective and try to narrate your observation just like a narrator in a book will narrate. You may see the epitome of human frenzy toward consuming things. You are a cornucopia of entertainment my dearest.
New York is forever pregnant with creative minds and entrepreneurs; small businesses like bodegas, restaurants, grocery stores, printing shops, art studios, performing companies, theatres, and galleries are just only a few examples. These hardworking, stubborn, dreamers have pumped blood into your heart and given you that vibrant soul. However, New Yorkers always take the city for granted. Although 60% of it is a legitimate reality, they still fail to fathom your capabilities and capacity.
One of the biggest highlights for me was The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It became my temple where every other weekend I would go to see the works of demigods conceived by the divine goddess of art. It’s like a palace for all the beautiful and brilliant who survived the absurdity of time and claim their places in the pages of history. I would pay a dollar entry fee and could travel through Asia, Africa, Egypt, and Europe to America riding the time machine of Art and History. My usual routine was to pay my first visit to Count Ugliano and his sons, a magnificent sculpture made by 19th-century French sculptor and painter Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. I would always take a 360-degree walk around the sculpture and make so many secret paintings in my mind. I am quite certain at this point that the reason I picked clay is this sculpture. Its design, structure, poetry, his perfect merry dance of mind, heart and hand have cast a permanent spell on me. I would perambulate the halls just like the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own did in the library of Oxbridge the only difference is the time that I belonged no one would escort me out for being a woman. Nevertheless, we still live in a time, where we walk around museums full of work created by men; row after row, column after column in words and pictures showing us how the world is and how it will be; take a walk through The MET from 1st floor to the Rodin Hall then to the European paintings and sculpture (19th and early 20th century). Rosa Bonheurs painting The Horse Fair is standing commanding the space with grace and merit. How can you not be filled with hope, inspiration and desire to create something that human. Something that knows how to communicate beyond time, culture, and gender. As childish as it sounds, I have stood in front of many works of art in this museum and tried to mentally talk to the creator of the piece. Tell them how I felt and ask them if they would tell me what they have felt. Tell me what I don’t see, talk to me, I am an amateur priestess at the foot of your door asking for sight. You have created this metaphysical need in me that is now as important as food and love. I didn’t know how much I loved feeding my mind with these visual feasts. I had to wait until I was in my 30s. I would wonder and talk to this human who passed hundreds of years ago. It is exactly like how religious people go to the temple and talk to the god or goddess they believe in. Tell them all their happiness, sadness, grief, guilt or desire. I did that too but with painters, sculptors, poets and craftspeople.
For the past 4 years, it’s been the time of the post-pandemic era. As an international student, the after-effect of post-pandemic time was agony. My entire life savings fell victim to the vampire fangs of inflation. Each time I convert my Canadian dollar to US money about 41%-36% of it evaporated into the oblivion of good politics. It was bad enough for me to sit down with a pen and paper to calculate and recalculate the cost of food Vs art supplies. Yet I will still say that one doesn’t need a lot of money to learn and enjoy the arts in New York, this is how much intellectual property your government and citizens own.
I have been in North America for 14 years, yet you made me feel more at home than anywhere else. Walking down the streets of Jackson Heights has always taken me back to the streets of Narayangonj where I grew up as a child. I guess the fact that nothing you have makes me feel like an alien in a foreign territory; even though I am in a foreign land with poor language skills. No matter whichever part of the world an individual comes from there is a community here. They must be patient enough to find it. I walked onto your shore to be a painter; five years later I’m a painter, a sculptor and ready to be sea-bound again. Time has its cruel way of speeding up when you are mindful of it.
Therefore, I have come to this dreaded moment of saying goodbye. I knew this day would come sooner than I thought it would, and my heart would stop for a second. My graduation ceremony is done and saying goodbye to my friends was probably the hardest thing I have done during my stay. Their love and care have made me richer than I have ever been. As the world moves, the rain washes, the leaves turn, the soft flakes of snow cover your body, and mid-April cherry blossoms adorn you in pink and white, remember the moments we lived together. Let Me Be in Your Heart as unrequited love and You as my favourite poem. Know that my seafaring soul one day will return to you just to say another brief hello or a longed-for kiss until then take care of that reckless heart of yours as you always forget to do.
Yours
Sindbad, Ismael or just Asha.
Sometime in the summer of 2024.
By Asha
