Chapter
FOUR
AFTER MY PARENTS WENT BACK TO INDIA, AFTER MY husband’s paternity leave dried up, there came the terrifying moment when it was just the baby and me. A normal day in modern motherhood; an awful aberration in the history of child-raising.
So much of a new parent’s life is spent latching buckles. Where there used to be multiple hands, we now have belts and gates and harnesses. But someone still has to clamp them in place. Just like that, I had been evicted from my own life and placed on a strange new planet that was administered by the bureaucracy of motherhood. Time itself changed. A day became something to trudge through. The tight, tired feeling in my lower back became a permanent fixture. I tried yoga. I tried therapy. I tried the Baby Clay class. I tried more coffee. I had many sweet moments with my baby, but nothing was as sweet as the relief I felt when my husband returned from work and took the baby over.
Finally, one bleak winter morning, some elemental instinct made me get out of the apartment with the baby in a sling and walk to the nearest corner and get on a city bus. It was going toward the riverfront in Brooklyn. That sounded like a fine place to be. When we got there, though, I realized I didn’t particularly want to be there. Where I wanted to be was on the bus, watching the world go by.
Thus, I discovered, the wheels of the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, all over town. Soon this became a habit. It didn’t matter what bus or where it was going. Dazed from lack of sleep, I would walk out of my apartment building with the baby snug against me and make for the bus stop. If there was a bus at the corner, I would get into it. If not, I would walk to the next corner and catch whatever bus happened to stop there. It was like climbing onto a carousel. The bus itself was my destination as long as it was empty enough that I could score a window seat. For a couple of dollars and change, my baby and I had a warm hour or two and a ladleful of Brooklyn Stew. The bus was a moving theater. But a very low-stakes theater, one in which you could watch the play, slip into your thoughts, lose the plot thread, and then return to the play and still somehow make sense of it. A woman walks into a shoe shop. An old lady pushes a cart into a supermarket with discounts plastered all over the windows. A security guard outside a dollar store is laughing on his phone but changes his expression briefly to look sternly at a man walking out. Suddenly there was so much to see.
At first I was just grateful to not be in Baby Clay class. Any of the many hours that I spent bus-hopping was livelier than the forty-three excruciating minutes I once spent watching three infants (including mine) drool into Play-Doh while the adults made awkward conversation about moving or not moving to the right school districts. I did feel a bit guilty climbing into the bus. Back in the apartment, there were always dirty dishes. But it was not just the undone chores. A modern baby’s life is as culturally demanding as a Jane Austen heroine’s. She needs to draw, paint, and play the piano. Instead here was my baby staring out through a foggy bus window and then drooping off to sleep, lulled by the hum of an internal combustion engine. I consoled myself by imagining how a big toy manufacturer would have marketed this ride: “Engage your baby’s cognitive and social skills with a bus ride today! The window will provide her a constant diorama of scenes that will activate her reasoning, memory, and problem-solving. The occasional glimpses of her own reflection will trigger self-awareness. And when she is ready to sleep, the gentle rocking motion will remind your baby of the safest place on earth, your womb!”
•
Buses were useless to me until then. I had gone years without getting on a bus. If I was not taking the subway or biking, I walked. I don’t know if this should be considered a hobby or a disorder, but going for a walk is my idea of a marvelous time. I love hiking, I love walking in the park, and I love street strolling. Of course, when I came upon the term flaneur, I fell upon it greedily—What? There’s a word for the kind of aimless wandering I love so much?
Brooklyn, where I live, is a flaneur’s paradise with its broad sidewalks. When I visit my parents in India, I frequently walk on the railway platform near their house, which feels akin to the promenades in many European cities. Few neighborhoods in Ernakulam have footpaths, but this does not mean that vehicles have the right-of-way. Instead, vehicles and pedestrians have joint custody of the road, and most of the time this custody is amicable. Still, the luxury of a broad sidewalk on which I can walk absent-mindedly is something I savor whenever I return to Brooklyn, with its tree-lined, dog-shit-strewn sidewalks.
Walking the city is a kind of reading. If the city is the text, the sidewalk/footpath/pavement is where we write our notes. Like many writers, I walked aimlessly and narcotically. In the middle of the day and late in the night. In the hell heat of Brooklyn summer and during its wicked winter. I have walked alone, crossing streets for no better reason than an amenable green light, climbing over abandoned riverside warehouses that would eventually be turned into glossy glass towers, pausing to ask directions because I was mesmerized by a face. I have walked with friends and lovers, drifting in and out of conversations and parks, bridging rivers of talk, back and forth.
On the other hand, if I actually needed to get anywhere, I took the subway. Like most New Yorkers, I had figured out exactly where to wait on the subway platform so that I could exit efficiently when going to work or coming home. There was nothing efficient about the bus. Once while walking down Broadway in Manhattan, I walked fifty-six blocks, outpacing the Broadway bus on each block as it paused in traffic or waited at traffic lights. Its slow, plodding ways were no use to me. But now, with a baby bundled against me, I was slow and plodding too. The bus and I were perfect for each other.
Often I watched and marveled at how unflappable the bus drivers were. On every block, the bus would stop two or three times—there’s the scheduled stop, the inevitable red light, traffic backup, and, just when the road seems clear, someone will cross in the middle of the block. Like a monk watching a mandala being destroyed, the bus driver would brake again and again, face stoic. It was as if each interruption was expected. Or rather, the interruptions were also part of the journey.
•
Of course, the flaneur as imagined by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin and other great writer-flaneurs was male. In Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, Lauren Elkin writes about how women have been excluded from the history of walking our cities, how scholars have dismissed the idea of a female flaneur again and again. But the presence of the flaneur does not preclude the presence of flaneuses. Lynda Nead, in Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, shows that women were flaneusing in the streets of London as flaneuring came into existence as a modern activity. Baudelaire himself writes about the women he sees on the streets, from which we can assume that women were not only seen but also seeing. Elkin and Nead argue that flaneuses have always existed; they were just made invisible by male readings of flaneury.
To that, I add this question: Is walking the only way to flaneur? If casual wandering and a love for the “infraordinary” are the hallmarks of the flaneuse, if it is an attitude to urban life above all, then perhaps a bus slowly slithering through the streets of Brooklyn can be a catalyst of flaneury, just as much as a café on a well-positioned corner. After all, what could be more infraordinary than the city bus? And who is more anonymous than a mother with a child? The presence of a child is like an invisibility cloak. Nothing to see here, just a mother and a child. The usual stuff. Humdrum. Men whose eyes would have lingered on us before look through us now. It is as if the borders of our selfhood are bleeding into the environment, turning us into background scenery. If we are out and about instead of at home, it must be for some boringly respectable errand like buying spinach or seeing a doctor.
In those limbo days of early motherhood, I pulled this invisibility cloak around me like a safety blanket. It was only after I became invisible that I fully realized the weight I had been carrying around as an object. The burden of looking busy and indifferent, fending off protection or attention. The weight of being constantly looked at. How freeing to no longer be an object. So this is what those male flaneurs were experiencing.
But, over the course of a century, something else has come to rest on flaneuring/flaneusing. The word has become loaded with a kind of sophistication I do not have. It immediately brings to mind a Western über-metropole composed of the best bits of Paris, London, and New York. As if these cities have not been unsafe for the people on their margins. Maybe it is also because so much has been said about flaneury that I no longer feel comfortable claiming to be a flaneuse without reading twenty books and parsing definitions propagated by academics in at least six disciplines. This seems to miss the point of flaneuring, which was premised on an intimacy with streets and not JSTOR. Or maybe it is simply because I have never quite learned how to twist my tongue around the curves of the word flaneur.
•
There’s a word in Malayalam for the kind of aimlessness I was indulging in: vaynokkal. Literally, it means “looking in the mouth”—I guess because what could be more pointless than staring into a mouth? Vaynokkal has many shades of meaning. Vaynokkal can be dreamy, a way to pin your gaze on something concrete while evacuating into your thoughts. Vaynokkal can also be alert, a thorough if pointless study of your surroundings. And sometimes vaynokkal can also be flirty, an opportunity to look and be looked at. The point is always the pointlessness. It is not self-improving in any way. It is a waste of time.
On the streets of my hometown, there were always clusters of vaynokkis, always men. Depending on the time of the day, they might be unemployed or underemployed, students or working men after their workday. They were also the men for whom the street was the workplace: food vendors, the auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers, the umbrella- and shoe-repair men who could be found under a shady tree near a bus stop. And there were those for whom the street itself was home: the urban poor who live on the margins of the margins. In an essay in the Oxford Anthology of the Modern Indian City, Arjun Appadurai, writing of the “organized idleness” of Indian streets, points out that hanging around is a highly cultivated aspect of Indian street culture. The streets may be filled with purposeful walkers and traffic patterns, but “there is always a steady audience of those who are in no hurry to go anywhere; they are just there to watch, perhaps to talk, perhaps to sell, but mainly just to pass the time.”
Rarely are any of the organized idlers on small-town Indian streets women. A woman who pauses to simply pass the time would invite curiosity, much of it threatening. And while different cities have different degrees of curiosity about women on the streets, it is safe to say that every Indian woman learns early to put on a stone face while walking through crowded streetscapes. As a teenager running errands for my parents or waiting to catch the school bus, I learned to put on a good-girl mask of studied indifference while remaining alert to movements in my vicinity.
It was not just unsavory male attention that I knew I had to ward off; it was also the eagle-eyed family friend and the neighborhood aunties and uncles. In Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade write about how a woman’s right to loiter is a crucial building block for an equitable city. Another useful word—loitering. So close to littering and its suggestion of something that shouldn’t be there. Loitering also brings to mind the lottery and the gamble of waiting for something to happen. The authors describe loitering as an act of pleasure-seeking that holds multiple delicious possibilities: expanding women’s access to public space; transforming women’s relationship with the city; reenvisioning citizenship in more inclusive terms. Their analysis is especially incisive in considering the ways in which restrictions on women’s mobility are rationalized in relation to the presence of the “dangerous other”: lower-class men and Muslim men. In fact, Phadke, Khan, and Ranade argue, such men are themselves the objects of surveillance. We need to rehabilitate this act of hanging out without purpose—not just for women, but for all marginal groups, they write, making a case for the right to “loiter without being asked what time of the day it was, why we were there, what we were wearing and whom we were with.”
I love this idea of loitering as an embodied act of taking space and giving space, as opposed to the individualism inherent to flaneuring. The loiterer is aware of others on the margins of the streetscape and willing to share this space, making it a collective public good, as opposed to a vantage point from which to objectify the other. This spoke to me, especially within the peculiarly American loneliness of nuclear-family child-raising, trapped within the bureaucracy of regular naptimes and cribs and Baby Clay and family restaurants.
It certainly helped that Brooklyn’s buses are full of immigrants from other countries whose attitude to babies in public places is one of hospitality. Fellow passengers made duck and cat noises, played peekaboo behind bulging shopping bags, and let little exploring hands touch their umbrellas and bags. And in turn, it didn’t bother me at all when different passengers told me the baby must be cold, the baby must be overheating, the baby must be overdressed, the baby must be hungry, the baby must be tired. I understood it to be phatic: a stranger’s way of saying, I am a fellow human looking out for the youngest member of our tribe. It takes a city to raise a child.
Especially during holiday season, the parenting sections of newspapers and magazines are full of articles about how to travel with children. How to entertain them on road trips and flights. What to pack. Which toys are the best for travel, with affiliate links embedded for your convenience. Some of this guidance is useful, and like those nineteenth-century travelers who turned to guidebooks because they did not have tutors, so many of us, raising children far away from our families, need this parenting wisdom. But after a certain point, the overflow of advice becomes the very thing that convinces us that a child cannot be deciphered or managed without this information. We start internalizing that the world outside is so dangerous and our children so willful that the encounter between the two must be controlled through entertainment and consumption.
Loitering in buses taught me that fellow travelers can always be trusted to offer you kindness and understanding. In the years that followed, rarely did I feel anxious about traveling anywhere in the world with a small child. A child unravels the self-centered individualism that modern travel encourages. The lovely strangers on the Brooklyn buses trained me to think of the world as a slow, gentle bus that we are all on.
I often thought of the travel writer Dervla Murphy, who has biked from Ireland to Delhi, fended off wolves in Yugoslavian forests, ridden a donkey through Ethiopia, and walked a mule through the Andes. She made some of these journeys with her child. Murphy was often questioned about the dangers of traveling with a child, but her response was that a child’s presence makes travel easier. It emphasizes your trust in the community’s goodwill. A child signals that you come in peace because a traveler with a child is vulnerable in ways that invite strangers to open toward them.
This is both true and false. We only have to think of the refugee families whose photos we have all become familiar with and all the others who did not make it to photos such as those. Middle and upper classes everywhere in the world have perfected the art of not seeing the refugee children, the homeless children, the children who live on the streets, the children who ask for more than we want to give. But when we turn away from a child who needs our help, we know we are turning away from our better selves. Children, for the most part, disarm the strangers within us.
I was, of course, neither appealing for asylum nor riding a horse across a snowcapped Andean mountain. There was no evidence for travel in my round-trip bus journeys. But I realize now that though I was sitting still in a bus in Brooklyn, I was journeying into a foreign land called motherhood. It’s such a strange experience to be out in public with your child in the early days of parenting. For the world, you are another mother with her child. For you, the world is a new place, charged by the electricity of what has happened to you.
Around then, a mythology of Brooklyn was coming into shape. A friend in São Paulo, Brazil, was looking to move apartments. She told me that one of the apartment buildings she went to see was called “Brooklyn.” A few months after I wrapped up my unpaid bus-hopping maternity leave, The New York Times reported that “among young Parisians, there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than ‘très Brooklyn,’ a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity and quality.” Speeding through an Indian highway that summer when I visited family, I caught sight of a billboard for Brooklyn in Bangalore. Brooklyn had become a brand, a simulation, a mythology.
But the Brooklyn I saw from the window of the bus was anything but très Brooklyn. This Brooklyn was not on the gourmet-coffee map of Brooklyn that I spied one day in a coffee shop. At least not yet. Here in this other Brooklyn, where there were not yet any luxury apartment buildings or farm-to-table restaurants or vintage boutiques, the bus was king and queen. It went where the trains did not. It plodded down streets full of bungalows with peeling paint, avenues that were lined with Chinese restaurants and shops that sold all kinds of random things that had fallen off the backs of trucks, and church-basement soup kitchens. Many of the neighborhoods the bus passed through bore the names of old Dutch and British slave-owning settler families, but the fruit-and-vegetable stores, filled with callaloo and star fruit and pide bread, told another story.
Sometimes I stayed on the bus all the way to the end of the route and rode the return bus home. Sometimes I made up errands—return a book in another neighborhood branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, find a newspaper in a language I don’t speak, buy a fruit that I have never seen before. From the leafy lulls around Prospect Park, the B16 took me to the hustle and bustle of commercial streets in Borough Park. The B35 skirted the borough like the sweep of the sun above, from Remsen Village in the east to the East River in the west, the pastoral names ironic against the gritty concretescape the bus traverses. The B41 picked up shoppers and schoolkids on the commercial stretch of Flatbush Avenue, then visitors to the park, the Botanic Garden, and the museum, before it crawled on Seventh Avenue toward artisan ramen.
One day, a woman got on a crowded bus. A big, older woman in a ragged jacket. She looked through her wallet and brought out one MetroCard after another. None of them worked. The driver curled his mouth and said, “The bus is not leaving till you pay the fare.” In all my days of bus-hopping, this was the only time I saw a bus driver be cruel. Silently, the woman went through all her useless MetroCards again. “You need to get off the bus right now,” the driver yelled, gratuitously since the bus was pin-drop silent by now. He switched off the engine and crossed his arms. Passengers sighed. The woman shuffled and pretended to search in the pockets of her threadbare jacket.
And then, the man sitting in the handicapped seat leaned on his stick and arched forward and handed his MetroCard to the woman. She swiped it, the bus driver switched on the engine, and we were hurtling past the trees of Green-Wood Cemetery as they slowly broke green. Winter had lost the battle and spring was pushing its way through.
And if there is something to match the generosity of its people, it is the exquisite beauty of Brooklyn. My favorite time to be in a bus was the soft-spoken hour before the sun set. Gas stations and silent leafless trees and graffiti on the side of an ancient building and playgrounds with someone’s water bottle left on a bench. On a block of creamy Victorian mansions, suddenly a bold red door. The parabolic curve of the bus as it rounded the corner on Avenue X. Nestling against a smooth bus seat, my beautiful little burden breathing on me, I felt transported, again and again and again.
Sitting on the bus going nowhere also brought back muscle memories of sitting in other buses in other places. The overnight buses of Turkey, where the conductor brings you instant coffee. The ring-road buses of Delhi that circle the city in a dusty loop, punctuated by gorgeous monuments. The bus ride in Uruguay along the coastal highway during which a vegan young woman cried on my shoulder telling me how European meat factories buy cows in Uruguay in order to circumvent EU animal-farming regulations. The bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap that unfortunately broke down along the way, fortunately at the most scenic spot possible. The bus from London to Oxford, from whose window I saw for the first time a Western suburb and felt the cold hand of anxiety that this is considered a decent way to live. All these memories intermingled with the clink of coins and MetroCard swipes and next-stop announcements.
•
Conversely, sitting in a city bus surrounded by the bustle of city life also reminded me how much I hated taking buses on U.S. highways. My husband and I would often take the bus to Washington, D.C., to visit his family. As soon as we found ourselves on the expressway, my mind would turn into rubber. I felt every minute of the four-to-five-hour journey. The minutes did not pass so much as drag themselves over the asphalt and air freshener and the bass of traffic.
I was surprised because I had believed what the books told me about the romance of the American highway. From the open road that called to Walt Whitman to the migrant workers on the mother road to California in John Steinbeck’s Depression epic to the freewheeling escape from adulthood in Jack Kerouac’s counterculture narrative, the shape and size of this fat country, sprawled from coast to coast, mountain to desert, lends itself to long, winding roads of self-discovery. But what I didn’t realize until I got here and took my first bus ride is that those wide-open highways had given way to high-speed multilane expressways. About a decade after the publication of On the Road, Jack Kerouac tried to replicate the book’s wild 1940s zigzag from New York City to San Francisco. He had to give up.
On the Road was published in 1957, six years after Kerouac wrote his first draft on a long scroll, a highway in form, during three weeks in 1951. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which authorized the building of forty thousand miles of interstate expressways. The roads that Kerouac had improvised his road trip on were rapidly replaced by the “broad ribbons” that Eisenhower wanted to ensure that the military could move quickly in case of the atomic attack that never came. By the time On the Road was published, the death knell had already been rung for the highways that Kerouac journeyed on. There were also 30 million more cars on the roads.
Two decades after Kerouac’s failed attempt to retrace his travels, William Least Heat-Moon would go to great lengths to avoid Eisenhower’s broad ribbons as he road-tripped around the country, avoiding expressways and taking back roads whenever he could. So many of the incoherent resentments I felt toward interstates became more intelligible to me when I read his Blue Highways, the book that resulted from this three-month odyssey. Having grown up a child of the 1950s, Heat-Moon was there to witness the ways in which the country changed as it switched from highways to expressways. “We believed the national defense argument until it became apparent the four lanes were there to move not rifles but radios, not bombs but baubles; they were there to sell autos, tires and gasoline; they were there to push public transportation toward private transport, to give semi-trailer trucks a publicly-paid-for right of way,” he wrote elsewhere.
One of the casualties of the rapid expansion of expressways was Main Street, the arterial road of the American small town. Main Street was where the town came to shop, to get haircuts, to watch movies, to exchange library books, to stand at street corners and gossip. But as interstates bypassed towns, they sucked the mercantile life out of Main Streets and into their exit points, like “vacuums from hell,” as Heat-Moon puts it. Another casualty was regional food: as speed limits increased, independent restaurants vanished, and with them went “hundreds of Mizzus Somebody’s own blue-ribbon-at-the-county-fair recipe for corncob soup or nut pie à la Bama,” “the scent of a farmer’s loam after rain, the smell of a Gulf shrimp boat.” With the onset of expressways, these were replaced by what Heat-Moon describes as “low-margin high-turnover polystyrene food”—a description that I can never unthink now.
It pops into my head and makes me shudder with gratitude every time I stop for meals or snacks during road trips in India. There is so much delicious food to be found along the highways of India, from the fish and toddy shops lined temptingly along national Highway 66, which runs along the west coast, to the dhabas that pockmark the shoulders of the Grand Trunk Road, food destinations in themselves. In more recent years, American-style rest stops with fast-food-franchise restaurants have been creeping up along these highways. Whether by invasion or imitation, American versions of infrastructure get exported throughout the world. This means that the kind of monoculturization that American interstates disseminate does not simply stay at home. It becomes the face of travel around the world. More and more people will travel in the future, for work and for play. As countries around the world invest in infrastructure to meet this demand, we need to learn from the exorbitant environmental, social, and cultural price that the United States has paid for privileging automobile culture over public transportation.
The beginning of the interstate era coincided with the decline of investment in public transportation, just when the civil rights movement had managed to achieve desegregation in buses and trains, Mia Bay writes, in Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. From the beginning, racism was baked into the asphalt of the expressway in multiple ways. The expressways helped fuel white flight into the suburbs even while redlining kept communities of color in the city. Blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color were carefully excluded from the suburban autopias that the interstates led to. This was not an accidental oversight. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) routinely refused mortgages to Black people who attempted to buy suburban homes and maintained that neighborhoods occupied by “incompatible racial or social groups” were risky to invest in. The underwriting manual of the FHA recommended interstates as a good way to separate African American neighborhoods from white neighborhoods.
As my bus passed under the steady drone of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, I could see the way it had blighted that corner of Brooklyn, separating a primarily immigrant working-class community from a white neighborhood built around a neighborhood school and a sprawling park and a playground filled with white children. Policymakers such as Robert Moses often used interstates to break up and scatter neighborhoods they considered undesirable. Thus, the social and environmental cost of building an interstate was often borne by low-income neighborhoods populated by people of color, while the benefits—spacious houses, access to nature and outdoors, high-functioning schools, all the invisible tailwinds of living in a “good neighborhood”—accrued to white suburban neighborhoods. The interstate police patrols were also the first to operationalize racial profiling, a policy that began with the “war on drugs” and continued with the “war on terror.” What is an experience of freedom and safety for white road-trippers was and continues to be a fraught encounter for Black people and people of color.
The most dangerous moment in all my travels anywhere in the world was in a rural suburb in upstate New York where I had gone to attend an extremely white wedding. I was walking down a country road early one morning when suddenly four huge dogs flew toward me, enormous white teeth flashing like in a movie close-up of wild animals. Just before they got to me, a white woman on a porch up the road called them off. I had wandered into her property, she shouted, from behind the barrel of a gun. Did I not see the sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT?
As my bus moved through the bustling streets of Brooklyn, it moved through public property. Streets full of the vibrancy of human encounter. Street corners full of vaynokkis. The mingling of sound and smell to create new semantics. What I was looking at was Main Street, except spread out across the borough. Unlike expressways, many of which are increasingly built with enormous sound barriers that wall them off to contain noise pollution, the city bus moves through living communities. The world it moves through has not been standardized and franchised; it has room for the unexpected.
•
One day, we were on the second or third bus of the day when we caught the end of the school day. Like fish swimming downstream, they poured in, laughing, gossipy high school students, all bones and elbows and backpacks, their racial makeup spanning the breadth of the world. While one or two sat quietly doing their homework or pretending to, others made jokes, yelled and cursed, and played games. A girl in hijab psychoanalyzed a teacher. A group of boys burst into laughter and high fives every thirty seconds. And in one corner, a girl and boy held hands and talked to each other softly, though no one could have heard them anyway. I sat amid them, mammal among birds, and wondered which one of these my sleeping baby would be in ten, twelve, fourteen years.
The bus sped down the avenue, and I noticed something strange. The subway tracks above the ground in the distance, that ancient bakery at the corner—surely I had been here before. As far as I could tell, this was my first time on this bus route. But déjà vu gnawed at me. Where were we? The vagueness of the memory itched. Then I finally remembered. Years ago, I had walked down this very avenue to get my fingerprints scanned as part of my application for my green card. In the basement of a discount shopping mall, I had pressed my fingers onto a glass plate and recorded them for the Department of Homeland Security.
It had taken me several hours that day to get to this part of Brooklyn and I had wondered then, Why is the application support center here? I was annoyed by the long, fumbling ride, changing train after train, asking directions to people who misled me. Most of all, I was annoyed by myself. I had turned into an immigrant. I had proved him right, that video documentary guy who had announced, “People from the Third World do not travel. They immigrate.” For so long, I had taken comfort in being an outsider in the United States. But there I was, marrying a U.S. citizen, auditioning to belong, begging to be included. And after all that, there was the anticlimax of the Application Support Center, which looked like a place where you go to get an illegal abortion. What is it doing in this random, nondescript corner of Brooklyn? I had grumbled to myself then. The bus now stopped around the corner from there.
The couple who were holding hands untwined and he got off. He stood on the corner, a skinny Hispanic boy, waving furiously at her, the Asian girl with braces. As the bus started moving off, he held his right hand close to his heart and then signed I love you with his fingers. And she smiled that adolescent metallic smile from the bus and signed back: I love you.
There are no random, nondescript corners in Brooklyn. Earth and air, glass and skin and bus—our fingerprints are everywhere.