I’ve been settling into a kind of rhythm in my life in New York. It varies depending on the time of day and the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed but I can either be found skipping down the street like a cartoon character or curled up in a corner of my room, rocking back and forth as I repeat the mantra “you’re not real, you’re not real” to the many-splendoured menagerie of my inner demons. There are no middle stages, but my therapist tells me this is normal for a Big Life Change.
Autumn (or “fall”, as the Americans endearingly call it) has always been one of my favorite times of the year on the East Coast. The air is crisp and cool, people are less angry, and at present the upturn in my social life is a gratifying change from a summer spent roasting away like a hapless Joan of Arc in the merciless inferno that is Lahore. I have taken a loft for a few months in Brooklyn, which is one of those sentences I have always aspired to write. How airy it sounds, how wonderfully boho! The place belonged to one of my friends who — for reasons involving real estate agents, a gofundme.com campaign and four federal charges — has had to leave the country for a few months on rather short notice. His disaster is my good fortune and I am now an inhabitant of a cavernous loft space in an area called Bushwick. I live up four flights of stairs in what used to be an old sewing factory. My apartment has high ceilings and a nice view of the Manhattan skyline from a distance and I am deliriously grateful for it every morning. Despite my fondness for autumn, though, heating this place makes me long for global warming to arrive more quickly than predicted. The only disadvantage of loft-style living is that, in essence, you are in a giant cavern which is difficult to heat and impossible to cool. The temperature has already dropped to the single digits, and the large windows and high ceilings have turned against me so that most of the time, I walk around the place looking like Fagin from Oliver Twist, dressed in sweeping robes and fingerless gloves.
I have taken a loft for a few months in Brooklyn, which is one of those sentences I have always aspired to write
I fit right into my neighborhood. Bushwick is a very self-consciously ‘cool’ place and being peculiar seems to be a prerequisite here. It’s the kind of place where people walk around wearing sparkling oversized shoes and sunglasses in the shape of cats. This upswing in Bushwick’s fortune is a relatively new phenomenon, as most gentrification tends to be. Five years ago you would not have come to this part of town without a switchblade, a former felon as an escort and a bulletproof girdle. I personally knew two girls who’d been assaulted here, back then, in horrific incidents that I won’t describe. Things have changed so completely, and so quickly, that the sites of their assaults are now a bagel shop and a wine store specializing in South Western Australian blends, respectively. In other words, you don’t need a girdle no more. My neighbor, a woman called Razor who sports a Mohawk and smells like death, insists this development makes the place “less real, man, you know?”
I visit the wine store more often than I should. It’s not that I am a huge wine drinker, but after my time in Pakistan, the idea of even being inside a liquor store seems so renegade to me, so otherworldly and fantastical: like being in a marijuana dispensary in Amsterdam or a Hindu temple in Peshawar. There are all the liquors and there are the wines. And people just come in and, like, buy them. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t it mad?! I feel that way in my flat too, and more than once, I have switched on the lamps and done a dance of ecstasy and gratitude after realising they won’t die because of loadshedding.
Hipster paradise - Bushwick, Brooklyn
My friends tell me these are signs of culture shock. I suppose that’s true in a way. Much like my shock at the idea that most Americans think having a passport is a luxury they can’t imagine (“But you don’t even need visas, you ungrateful fools!”), the idea of public nudity has come as a sort of slap on my cheek.
As part of my near-constant efforts at rebranding my inner self by changing my outer self I have joined a gym here called, rather ominously, Crunch. The only reason I chose it was because it has the tag line “No Judgments” written in friendly, orange letters under the violently purple logo. Since I work primarily from home, it’s an excuse for me to get out of the house and my own headspace. Plus it’s heated.
The culture shock comes with the fact that the Americans are totally OK with nudity in the locker rooms, which I don’t mind, but also expect it of me, which I do mind. I have never understood this proclivity for undressing in front of strangers. Apparently, American high schools make their students use large communal showers rather than individual cubicles, no doubt in an effort to introduce them early on to emotional trauma. Had this happened to me in school, when I looked like a figurine made up of doughnuts, I would have slit my wrists and then artfully arranged myself on a gleaming white floor in protest, fully clothed. Thankfully they do have shower cubicles but sometimes they are full and then you are expected to use the “communal area”. I do not look like a Calvin Klein model, and so I wait it out, munching unhappily on a protein bar instead.
Even out of the shower, people are just strutting down the corridor stark naked. Perhaps they do this because everyone at the gym is fit (no judgments? I judge. I JUDGE!) but it’s more likely because the only towels the gym provides are, I am convinced, oversized hand towels. My waistline doesn’t fit in just one towel, so I have to suffer the humiliation of wrapping several smaller towels around me, looking like a cross between Rekha in a sari and a pilgrim at umrah.
But one of the reasons I adore the fall is because of that uniquely American event, Thanksgiving. It was this Thursday, and if you can get past the revisionist undertones of the massacre of an entire indigenous people, it’s a charming holiday. It’s one of the few ones that actively encourage you to list out why you are thankful for the things in your life. Surrounded as we are by the news of Ahmedi killings and Paris massacres and Trump for President, it’s a good idea to list out what you’re grateful for in life. It helps. So, I want to say here that I am thankful: I am thankful for the homesickness because it means I am loved. I am thankful for the fear, because it means I have more to learn. I am thankful for your attention, because you teach me so much, and I am thankful for the wine store, because I get to say that here. Without judgment.
