It's unseasonably warm for winter in the city. A breeze that would normally sway the icicles hanging from my ribcage, instead brushes against warmer bones. I round the corner of 116th and nod to Nabil, who is busy with a line of hungry customers congregated around his halal cart. I keep walking – past the masjid where evening prayers are ending. The street is crowded with smiles and I weave through the enthusiastic exchange of African and French greetings. Turning the next corner, I cross paths with the youngsters who make their cash on these sidewalks. An exchange of glances, an acknowledgement, and it's back home.
When I moved to New York I thought it important to be rooted in a community. To know my neighbors. To have a sense of reality. My neighborhood was the eclectic Uptown mix. From the Moroccans at the cart, to the Yemeni stores on each corner, to the Dominicans who insisted on calling me 'Primo', to the West Africans who had come from Senegal, Mali, Cote D'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau and elsewhere – it was nice to be surrounded by brown people.
Over the next year and a half, I would learn from all of them – looking, listening and absorbing life lived daily on the streets of the concrete jungle. This process would require figuring out the ins and outs of the neighborhood – reminiscent of discovering much of the same during those years spent in Himalayan villages and on continuous train journeys. Uptown, with its changing face, would become the setting of all my adventures and misadventures, and it would be Harlem that would become home.
Every day, I would attend one of the premier educational institutions of the country (with its self-proclaimed prestige, dynamic academics, and absurd tuition), but every night return to 115th. My time in Harlem has constituted an education in itself. My experiences added texture and a dose of reality, to what I would hear about human rights, development, and poverty in the classroom. My roommate, who had grown up in the neighborhood, would tell stories about how he saw it all change. How crack had decimated the community and how the effects of addiction became part of daily life. And there remain the on-going debates over gentrification and the continuing battles over land and property.
For me, the affluent and working class cultures of Harlem have been uplifting. The legacies of past residents: Hughes and Ellison, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, and Baldwin, Belafonte and Robeson remain powerful. And on top of all that, the crowds on 125th street, the bazaar-like atmosphere, and the street hawkers selling everything from scented oils to incense to bootleg DVDs would never fail to invoke memories of India. I often asked nearly everyone I met where they are from, trying to draw out their stories. However, it was those young men on the corner, who provided the sharpest and realest points of reference.
Education takes many forms, if we are open to learning from all that we see and do. On my block, there were also the addicts, the junkies, the sirens and arrests, and the not-so-nice landlady downstairs – who would blast her radio at 8 am sending shockwaves through my bedroom floor. Each has added layers to my own growth and understanding. As the pages turn to another chapter, the plan is for Harlem – the only home I have known in New York – to remain home for now. In all its ups and downs it has remained a place of learning, and in the end, what more could you ask for?
