nyc – ARUNDHATI BASU

Fantasies of the Season

I wanted to traipse around the city today. For another gander at the holiday windows along Fifth Avenue. But a run and high-intensity workout followed by a session of packing suitcases (we leave for France tomorrow) has done me in. I have been daydreaming while writing this post because oh travel brings with it sweet anticipation (even though my family did make some pother about it because we head to Paris and Strasbourg), so it took some time to get about putting up these vignettes of NYC’s famed holiday windows from last season and this.

The champion of all the narratives was that of Saks Fifth Avenue. They come up with concoctions in their windows that capture the fizzy-frothy spirit of Christmas alright. I never cease to be astonished by the lengths to which they go to make your jaws drop. So what if Macy’s started the game in NYC in the 1880s when they introduced New Yorkers to a novel spectacle. Lest you are not over a century old (write to me, if you are), on a fine December in 1883, outside Macy’s, people were greeted by the sight of Santa Claus on a mechanical sleigh, chauffeured by his team of reindeer, on a circular track that moved around the windows. Santa on parade. Imagine the conversations then. Another Christmas, Macy’s had a tin facade which was labelled ‘A Fantasy of Christmas’ and it did look the part. I shall include a photo that is sourced from the Internet because I was not around to take it in 1959 as you would imagine. Unless I am 76 and passing myself off as half the age on this blog. You never know.

Today the windows have been taken a few notches up from the simple displays of yore when the message was overwhelmingly of sentimentality and nostalgia. After all nostalgia connects us to a past that we know about. It is familiar — and we all ache for the familiar. Something to give us roots. The future can wait even as it hovers around the corner. Yet how these windows continue to evoke this feeling of joy and wonder when you lay eyes on them every season. Like an affirmation of the state of mind that Christmas is. And alongside, the Christmas tree pop-up shops on the pavements of NYC selling Fraser firs and the scent of pine, the scent of Christmas.

Macy’s old-fashioned look for the Christmas of 1959 (sourced from the Internet).

Last Year This Time

2017-12-11 04.30.47 1.jpg — Last year, it snowed when we noshed at the Bryant Park market

2017-12-11 04.30.44 1.jpg — Chicken and waffles soused in maple syrup. My favourite American dish. (whispers: It is awfully good).

2017-12-11 04.30.43 1.jpg — Treasures of NYC

2017-12-11 04.30.48 1.jpg — Carousel at Bryant Park

Processed with VSCO with a5 preset — The Christmas tree of Rockefeller Center

Processed with VSCO with c2 preset — Street sights

2017-12-11 04.08.45 2.jpg — Santa loiters in an Irish pub

2017-12-11 04.23.30 1.jpg — It shuts shop this year

2017-12-11 04.23.33 1.jpg — Cartier, tied up in a sparkly red bow

Saks Fifth Avenue, Last Year

2017-12-11 04.28.48 1.jpg — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2017-12-11 04.28.56 1.jpg — And then, Once Upon a Holiday, designers put forth their takes on fairytale looks for Snow White.

2017-12-11 04.28.43 1.jpg — Alberta Ferreti

2017-12-11 04.28.41 1.jpg — Oscar de la Renta

2017-12-11 04.30.31 1.jpg — Ooh, Snow White as Bent Neck Lady

Saks Fifth Avenue, This Year

2018-11-24 11.10.31 1.jpg — The Theater of Dreams. The stage is a grand thing and this is the store’s paean to it.

2018-11-24 11.09.02 1.jpg — Bent Neck Lady is a favourite with Saks Fifth Avenue, you reckon?

2018-11-24 11.10.02 2.jpg — ‘Put on a dazzling face’

2018-11-24 11.10.05 1.jpg — My fella’s dazzling face

2018-11-24 11.09.04 1.jpg — ‘Some like it luxe’

2018-11-24 11.10.01 2.jpg — ‘Puttin’ on the glitz’

And maybe because I like an anti-climax better than you, because ‘We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men /Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw’, because I love spewing nonsense, here’s concluding this holiday post on a few random notes.

2018-11-22 05.36.52 2.jpg — Macy’s Sunny the astronaut who travels with her friends through space to help Santa Claus fix his sleigh for Christmas.

Dec 15, 2018

Arundhati Basu86 Comments

What, The Last Month of The Year Already?

It astonishes me how the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months, till another year is going to come to an end. Time never ceases it seems till you are caught in a situation where you are trapped in a slow train with people around you conversing in another language, you have missed the last bus at a lonely place where the ocean batters the cliffs, or better still, you are sleeping in an unreserved train compartment with batty coppers and convicts for company. And here’s time sprouting wings, so that autumn’s been too brief a spell. Sparse brown leaves cling to the branches in the park, loathe to leave just yet, dangling in the cold wind like earrings turned to a shade of liquid russet in the soft sun. The park cleaning authorities use their leaf blowers daily to collect them in piles, so that even as they go about their job, I cannot help admiring this pretty spectacle that it makes. A whirligig of golden butterflies in the air.

This is my cheeky last paean to autumn even though the wind outside is frigid and every evening walk and morning run involves filling the lungs with icy air. We caught the last legs of the season in Central Park last month when the colours in the woods had already peaked and there were yellow, oranges and reds in dribs and drabs. When we met an introvert Great Bernese, a big beautiful girl who warned Adi off with a couple of woofs. So that now I can tease my husband in the same vein as he takes off on me. Last summer in Vermont, a golden retriever with the face of a (chubby) angel and the mien of a shrew, had flown at me when I wanted to say hello. Adi has not stopped reminding me of this dark incident since with unseemly glee, saying, ‘You are possibly the only girl who has been almost attacked by a golden retriever.’

These little pleasures have been cemented by biggish birthday pleasures of a sparkler-laden cake turning up at a French restaurant which is an institution of sorts in NYC, where the food made the senses hum with quiet joy; celebrating a new holiday for us (Thanksgiving); meeting a former colleague in the city and going on walks in the tenements of Lower Manhattan where we wondered at the eccentric workings of an artist who bought a synagogue when he had merely stepped out to buy shoes; spotting migratory birds such as a Great Black-Backed Gull by the Hudson; and having my scalp almost lifted one freezing morning by a mob of gulls who were being fed by an old man (because apparently wild creatures cannot continue their cycle of life without our nosiness). That’s all in my tangled web of recollections, and oh, some portly squirrels at work too.

2018-11-14 09.42.28 1.jpg — Lafayette, NYC

2018-11-09 06.00.13 1.jpg — The woman at the table next to ours and I were both startled when this sparkler tower arrived at ours, and just like that, I was a child all over again.

2018-11-14 09.42.31 1.jpg — French Onion Soup with beef shank, so full of flavour that you could compose a quick ode to it

2018-11-14 09.42.30 2.jpg — Pasta parcels called agnolotti stuffed with black trumpet mushrooms and topped with shavings of black truffle. Give me a daily diet of it.

2018-11-14 09.42.30 3.jpg — Grilled trout paired with coco beans and saucisson. A time to scoff and grunt with satisfaction.

2018-11-28 03.14.34 1.jpg — Immigrant stories. Strange cocktails, sighted in the Lower East Side, Manhattan.

2018-11-28 03.14.30 1.jpg — The synagogue of Rivington Street built in the Moorish Revival style of architecture. Once a place of prayer for Romanian Jews, it was bought by a reclusive Jewish artist, Hale Gurland, who lives on top of the synagogue where you can see the four orange windows and flees from any kind of publicity.

2018-11-28 03.14.31 1.jpg — Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse at the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

2018-10-28 02.45.18 1.jpg — I got squirrels and sheep on me desk too.

2018-11-24 11.10.39 1.jpg — The foraging furry ones of Madison Square Park

Dec 6, 2018

Arundhati Basu82 Comments

A Place Under the Sun for Everyone

Would it not be utopia realised if we accepted each other just a little more? For the most part, scouring the newspapers every day has become an act of trampling through a swamp of wretchedness. But yesterday, June 24, there was hope on the roads of NYC.

At some point in the afternoon, which was slowly turning oppressive with the forecast of a thunderstorm later on, we found ourselves in the middle of the LGBT parade in the city. We had stepped out for a bite at Wagamama.

There were cops everywhere. Barricades transformed the avenues. People pranced down them, instead of cars. The mood was carnivalesque, an explosion of colour everywhere we looked. People milled all around us in tees, dresses and flags in rainbow hues. Bare torsos. Toned abs. Impressive pecs. Nipples pierced. Nipples covered with star laces. Leotards. Head cages. Headgears of neon feathers fanning out over heads. It was a riot of street fashion and personalities. It was difficult not to whip around every second and click. Click. Click. Click. It was one of those days when you wanted to be everywhere at once.

Floats followed each other in quick succession as spectators cheered on, and well it was most uplifting, especially, the sight of the NYPD cops marching shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT community. The message largely was of inclusion. And you know what added a dash of goodness to the day? The fact that it was bloody well-organised. I was constantly comparing it in my mind to the Notting Hill Parade when the streets of London heave with people, when restaurants and eateries in the city ban revellers from using the loos, when the lack of transportation is pitiful. Even the tube runs so full that you are forced to miss train after train, in the effort of not returning home a squashed pea. Of course when you reach home late into the night, you vow never to get caught in the parade again.

Below are a handful of scenes from the Pride Parade 2018 where the emphasis was on being Defiantly Different. This in a city where no two days are the same. And so I leave you to indulge the senses in a whirligig of colours, while I go and catch the World Cup.

Jun 25, 2018

Arundhati Basu52 Comments

Heavenly Bodies of The Met

We finally ended up at The Met. It had been on my mind for some time and it being a bank holiday when the sky was swollen for the most part with clouds, Adi gave in. And will you get this, for not one, but two consecutive days. That is the power of love (or, a rainy weekend). A fine museum can be a salve to the soul that seeks more. Up the classic steps of The Metropolitan Museum and we were inside its august portals and soon the senses were buzzing with the wealth of art inside the maze of chambers. We were swept up by burial masks and the art of the Incas wrought in gold, smooth and veined busts of Greek gods and goddesses in marble, ancient Mayan figurines and the works. Time sped by. It was a lesson loaded with geography and history, which I appreciated way more than I would have as a teenager. For then the purpose of life was to guzzle Mills & Boon romances in the back benches and yak endlessly on the landline.

Back inside The Met, we were surprised by a line-up of sumptuous and austere figures. Catholicism and fashion! Oh, why yes, images from the Met Gala earlier this spring came back in a flash. How could I forget? The eyes had goggled at the pageantry, and details like Kim Kardashian being unable to paint her face as a girl (deprived child) because she attended Catholic school, Rihanna walking into the gala in her gown of pearls and crystals, with an equally low-key mitre, and then the revelation of a mini skirt, lest you started questioning her sartorial statement…

Riveted by this unusual exhibition, the likes of which we have never seen, I did pop my head and hands through a press of bodies, to steal a handful of images. So here’s how faith and fashion colluded at The Met. And I can promise you, it ain’t the mendicant’s cuppa.

2018-05-30 11.40.12 1.jpg — Habit of the clergy. The soutane.

2018-05-30 11.40.00 2.jpg — Angelica by Dolce & Gabbana, in black wool crepe and buttons of gold.

2018-05-30 11.40.00 1.jpg — Thom Browne ensemble in black cashmere broadcloth, black mink and white Persian lamb (put me in mind of a ram with concave horns).

2018-05-30 11.39.59 1.jpg — Moschino’s black and white canvas. That headgear!

2018-05-30 11.39.56 1.jpg — Sheaths with Byzantine mosaic design

2018-05-30 11.40.09 1.jpg — Silk taffeta dress by Pierpaolo Piccioli for Valentino

2018-05-30 11.40.06 1.jpg — A Thierry Mugler ivory silk taffeta ensemble, accessorised with gold-painted feathers.

2018-05-30 11.39.58 1.jpg — Statuary vestment for the Virgin of El Rocio, ca. 1985, by Yves Saint Laurent. An affair in gold silk brocade, silk satin and metal Chantilly lace.

2018-05-30 11.40.05 1.jpg — Burred vision in gold and white. An evening look by John Galliano for Dior.

2018-05-30 11.40.01 1.jpg — Christian Lacroix wedding ensemble in silk brocade and tulle

2018-05-30 11.39.57 1.jpg — Sumptuous statuary vestment in blue silk jacquard and gold metal passementerie for the Madonna Della Grazie in Palagianello, Italy, by Riccardo Tisci.

Processed with VSCO with c3 preset — And Alexander McQueen’s evening look for the House of Givenchy.

Jun 13, 2018

Arundhati Basu32 Comments

The Blue Star of the Lower East Side

I ended up in China Town the other day. I was ambling along Eldridge Street in Manhattan when I spotted this old building that towered above me with its many Moorish arches. The promise of magnificence drew me in. The plaque declared it to be a synagogue that has been turned into a museum. A free museum.

Now free museums thrill me. I queued up for hours outside the Museo del Prado in Madrid one freezing day, and got caught in a downpour, but did it deter me? No sir. It just meant that I spent the next few days laid down with a solid fever. Yet I had bagged a free museum visit. It is the same reason I love London so. The best of its museums are free. Now that I have mentioned the word ‘free’ enough times to reveal my inner freebie loving self, I might as well get to the subject at hand.

I was in an orthodox synagogue, built in the 1880s by Ashkenazi Jews who were fleeing from the anti-semitism in Eastern Europe. Inside, I met an old lady showing a trio around. One of them was a boy. The lady introduced him to me as a rabbi-to-be. Startled he looked at her, and said, ‘Actually I am doing my BA.’ He had mentioned studying in a yeshiva to her, and she, it turns out, had added it up in her own mind as indicative of his grand religious plans for himself. The couple, possibly in their mid-60s, were visiting their son in New York from Minneapolis. We later had a long chat about their sojourns in the various parts of India. And then there was I.

‘I am curious,’ asked this cordial old guide, ‘what brought you here today?’ This is the part where I come up with a memorable answer. Boy, I aced it. ‘Oh you see, I love visiting museums, and I was passing by, so I popped in.’ Having stunned them thus, I followed around in her footsteps, as she led us up wooden steps and antiquated wooden balustrades, past stained glass windows, the early evening light filtering in in a surfeit of colours.

Inside the main sanctuary, the senses exploded with the celestial quality of the vision that lay before us. A circular stained glass window in ethereal blues towered above us. It was the heroine of the old synagogue, this rose glass window of seemingly gossamer loveliness. I am not religious, as I have often stated, but I am swept away when the architecture of a place of prayer uplifts the soul. To make us believe that there are exalted things and beings, that there is a larger design at work.

This rose glass window, said to weigh 6000 pounds, depicts the six-pointed Star of David. Within it floats a plethora of five-pointed stars. The concept was that it should reflect the night sky by opening up to it. The main dome and the other ceiling domes, framed by rows of moorish arches, are studded similarly with glinting golden stars.

The woman who was showing us around had sat in the pews of the synagogue, as a child on a field trip from school, and she recollected its decrepit state at the time. ‘It was in the ’80s when I never could have imagined that it could look like this,’ she mused, as she pointed to a few photo canvases stacked along the pews. They were evidence that the synagogue had fallen into disrepair, its walls peeling off, the dome in a shambles. Membership dwindled with time as former members moved out of Eldridge Street into quarters like Brooklyn and Borough Park and then came the Great Depression bringing devastation in its wake. Pigeons took up residence in the synagogue till it was decided that it simply could not be allowed to fade away. Renovations began in the ’80s and the result was before us. There was something old about it, something new, and in between was that vast blue window that took your breath away.

2018-04-18 09.50.28 1.jpg — The Orthodox synagogue of Khal Adath Jeshrun on Eldridge Street with its stained glass windows and moorish arches.

2018-04-18 09.50.26 1.jpg — The rose glass window towers above the main sanctuary where the congregation assembles on Fridays and Saturdays for services.

2018-04-18 09.50.22 1.jpg — There are stars everywhere you look and then there is the wonderful Moorish Revival architecture

2018-04-18 09.50.25 2.jpg — Elegant brass and glass chandelier

2018-04-18 09.50.22 2.jpg — Back to the Oculus from where I had to catch the train home. I cannot help taking multiple shots of this Calatrava ribbed structure that always makes me gawp.

2018-04-18 09.50.21 1.jpg — The white wings of The Oculus are for me a beloved part of the cityscape

Apr 19, 2018

Arundhati Basu76 Comments

The Manhattan Story

His face etched by age, the man in front of Big Wong stood with a faraway look in his face, his hands busy stuffing golden tobacco into the thin stem that stuck out from the side of a wooden bong. That’s not the bongo which would imply an antelope, or on the other end of the spectrum, a drum. But since you can spot our man in the featured photograph with the bong in his hand (behind the potbellied man in the blue tee), you could safely cross out both antelope and drum-shaped possibilities. Instead, you can probably figure out that the bong is a pipe with a filtration device that allows you to smoke anything from tobacco to cannabis. His white apron flecked extensively by red sauce, the man then continued to puff away at the pipe and release curls of smoke as he nodded vigorously to emphasise that he was not partial to getting clicked. Why he was out for a break from his overwrought job of churning out noodles and sauce-laden dishes.

With the clucking of his tongue and the shake of his head, he might as well have mouthed out, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than shooting photographs, so really Horatio, go eat some’.

We did eat a whole lot right after. Steamy bowls of soup with pork dumplings floating in them, a massive plate of noodles topped up with greens and strips of chicken and then the ubiquitous American Chinese dish called General Tso’s Chicken (that often surfaces on pinterest) appeared within minutes of our sitting at the table. All in big portions. We had forgotten the monumental portions of food served up in America. Surrounded by Chinese families going about their bowls with chopsticks and speaking in rapid Chinese, we slurped away.

This was Manhattan. Chinatown, New York. But I could have been easily in an eatery on the streets of Chinatown in Calcutta where the Chinese folks around us would been chattering in Bengali. The common factor was the intensely flavourful food, because that is what makes Chinese such a Friday night comfort food, isn’t it?

Do you put on your PJs after a long day at the end of the week and unwind with delicious Chinese and a frightfully scary movie? I look forward to such evenings when I rustle up Indochinese fare (typically it is about Schezwan dishes concocted with garlic and dried red chillies, moreish Manchurian dishes and chilli dishes which are typically batter fried chicken/fish/ veggies tossed up in spicy sauces). It is a version of Chinese food bequeathed to every Indian by the Han/Hakka community who made their way to Calcutta as far back as the mid 1800s when a businessman called Tong Achi established a sugar mill there.

The migrant Hakka people who belong to the provincial Hakka-speaking provinces of China started working in the sugar mill. In time they turned their skills to work in the tanneries (the stench of which can and will send you into a dead faint) to churn out fashionable and high quality leather goods in British India (working on leather was looked down upon by upper-caste Hindus) and some even operated opium dens. There are faded sepia photographs of rake-thin Chinese men with pipes of opium and punkahs (hand-held bamboo fans) alongside, staring at the lenses with glazed eyes, a sense of detachment from the squalor of their den. I wonder about stories from another era that the Manhattan Chinese have to tell too.

At the same time that some were making their inroads into British India, others chose to make the considerably longer journey to America, lured by stories of the gold rush of the 1840s.

Now New York to Calcutta spells a gigantic leap, but the common thread that runs through them is woven with the warp and weft of stories. Of migration, of immense determination to make it work despite abject circumstances and then these migrants’ renditions of Chinese food that was inevitably tempered by the environment that they found themselves in.

My jaunts have taken me to the Chinatowns in London, Kuala Lumpur, Seattle, Bangkok, Singapore, Port Louis in Mauritius to name some but the way of life of the Manhattan Chinese and the Calcutta Chinese have seeped into the very fabric of their surroundings.

Bringing you back to the streets of Lower Manhattan, the older generation of Chinese turn out to be sticklers for their customs, language and stern expressions. Far removed from the glitziness of the nearby Financial District of New York City, it is a world peopled by old Chinese men and women, bent double with age over walking sticks as they hobble across pavements, stopping once in a while to look askew at passers-by, cordial young bankers sitting inside their chambers and talking about their love for everything modern and coming across as the quintessential New Yorker living in their microcosm, younger store workers with colourful dragon tattoos splayed across their arms and then the antique shop owner with five generations of antiquing in the blood. The streets of Lower Manhattan are entrancing.

This was how we were introduced to the well-known and oft talked about grand American dream – that if you put in hard work why you shall reap the rewards – all tucked in comfortably within the streets of Chinatown.