My dear beloved city,
This is the most essential matter of the utmost importance that 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 were 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 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. 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 onto your shore 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 just like thousands of immigrants do every day.
Despite the difficult living conditions, I was mesmerized by the sheer capacity of the human mind, by what its fortitude can accomplish. I have wandered about your streets with friends and a lover to witness the architecture, admire history, or simply be a spectator. The old red brick building and the small corner pizza shops – they 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 sat on that boat beside a very special human, 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.
But I felt the beauty that day,
indescribable,
unpaintable,
uncapturable beauty.
It was in the Manhattan sky,
and 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 that you may never win. Of course, 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 on their own stories. However, the closer that I look, the clearer it reads as loneliness. Especially on the subways-more and more people with vacant eyes, 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 remain forever strangers to humans who have lived just next door for years. Even though, at times, it often felt like freedom. You step out of your apartment, and you can be anyone. No expectations, no burdens. 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. If an individual wants to bury their solitude and fill it up with the hysteria of experience. You have constellations of ventures to offer, whether it is waterfront, parks, lights or chaos of noise. If anyone ever wandered into Times Square or the financial district in lower Manhattan. I would ask them to pause for a moment, take a closer look at every human around them from a third-person perspective and try to narrate their observation just like a narrator in a book would describe. They 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 a few examples. These hardworking, stubborn dreamers have pumped blood into your heart and given you that vibrant soul. However, New Yorkers always take you 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 Ugolino and His Sons, a magnificent masterpiece 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, silent poetry, its 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. Yet, 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 Bonheur’s painting The Horse Fair stands commanding 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 speak 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 talk to the creator of the piece mentally. Tell them what I felt and ask if they would tell me what they felt.
Show 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 essential as food and love. I didn’t know how much I loved feeding my mind until I came to you. I had to wait to find you until I was in my 30s. I would stand there, talking to humans who lived hundreds of years ago. Just 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 last four years, it’s been the time of the post-pandemic era. For an international student, that meant 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 evaporates 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 fourteen 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 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 where someone is from, there is a community here. They only need patience 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.
And so, I have come to this dreaded moment of saying goodbye. I knew this day would come sooner than I expected, and my heart would stop for a second. My graduation ceremony is done, and saying goodbye to my friends was 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.
For a 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, from the crossroad of a new beginning.)