I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten a full meal in two days. Two days ago, I went to the Hungarian pastry shop, where I was eating the amazing Häagen-Daz and drinking the good coffee when my purse was stolen. I walked out of the buzz of exciting conversation and put my hand inside my coat pocket, and felt only emptiness inside. A minute before, I had seen a man consulting three watches on his palm like the Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I had wondered what the watches were for, and why he was looking at them so intently as he hurried by on Amsterdam Avenue. Now I knew. He was probably scoping out his day’s loot from the pastry shop, where unsuspecting out-of-towners had fallen victim. I am stranded in New York with no money, no bank card, no credit card, no keys, no passport.

Fortunately, I am leaving today, so there is no need to panic. I have borrowed twenty-five dollars from Rachel, a student at Bank Street. She is almost as bankrupt as I am. I look at my two notes and put them back in my pocket. I need them to buy my return ticket. If I can make a successful call from a public phone and make myself understood to the Dominicans who run the San Miguel Van Service out of South Providence, I could return home on just ten dollars. This means I could buy myself breakfast. However, if my English is incomprehensible to the nice Spanish speaker on the other side of the line, I am forced to take the metro to Port Authority, then my twenty-five goes to Greyhound, and I can’t have breakfast.

I am taking the minibus we call the Jalapeño bus service, and it is all that — sharp and pungent with Spanish accents from all over Latin America, with hot salsa music blasted at full volume…

Home. What an ironic way to think of Providence. I am taking the minibus we call the Jalapeño bus service, and it is all that — sharp and pungent with Spanish accents from all over Latin America, with hot salsa music blasted at full volume all through the ride. I’ve taken it so many times they know me by now. Once I was so enchanted with the beats of “La Machina!” that I asked the driver where he had bought it. The driver offered me the pirated tape as he dropped me off at my door.

“No, no,” Jason said, hastily. “You can’t take his tape. Here, let us give you some money.” He’s worried about taking things from people without paying. He even wanted to pay me for all the dinners that I cooked. “Jason, you don’t have to give me money for a dinner I made,” I say. He, one of five kids who spent half his childhood on social security benefits, knows that this is not logical. “Food costs money,” he says. We eye each other across the divide of two cultures that cut across our psyches like a visible line. For me, food is hospitality, a way of showing kinship. Food had appeared magically on the plate when growing up, and even now, as a foreign student without money, I make strange buckwheat pankcakes and pumpkin curry and don’t worry too much about where the next meal will come from. For him, food is a commodity bought at a supermarket, something that costs me money. And he knows that I have no money. So I try not to get too mad at him, and he tries not to get too mad at me, and somehow, so far, we work out our differences.

I take the tape and thank the driver and will not let Jason mediate the transaction with five dollars. Because I know the man does not want money. He may have just arrived and found himself in a land where he can not speak the language, but he can afford to give away music to people he likes. I became a regular patron of the Jalapeño bus service after this. It is also cheaper than the regular buses. The quarter slides into the worn-out public phone. A woman with a thick Spanish accent miraculously picks up and says “Hola!” and despite my desperate inability to understand a word of her responses, I manage to communicate that I need a ticket to Providence. “Dama-yanti?” she has my name in her list. I’m set. Three hours before I go back home, I can afford to buy myself breakfast before I leave.

I head out again, on one of my long walks down Broadway. Everywhere there are smells of onion and garlic frying in hot oil. Unidentifable spices floating out of doorways in almost unbearable, taunting ways: cumin and coriander, lemon grass, sesame oil. The colors of food — tangerine, squash, scallions, rotting in the cold January air. Strawberries for fifty cents in the middle of winter. Only in this city. And I am still starving.

Café de Nuit, Arles, 1888
(Oil on jute, 73 × 92 cm)
BY Paul Gauguin
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

The diner is on the corner of Broadway and a hundred something street. Heavy plate glass windows, green wooden sidings, chrome-plated metal fixtures. It’s Tom’s Diner of Suzanne Vega fame. The door is slow and heavy to the touch. The bell rings as I walk in. The clamour of Manhattan fades as I enter a space that is dim, quiet, introspective.

“Yes?” inquires the bald man with the salt-and-pepper moustache.

“You still serving breakfast?”

“Of course. Sit down, sit down.”

“Chilean? Argentinian?” He rolls his ‘r’s and looks like a general from one of Gabriel García Márquez’s surreal sagas. Behind the bar, a woman with dyed blonde hair chatters to the man who has just come in. Big muscles. And macho. “Sugar. Dos. La mujer- Puta! Una Puta!” He goes off into a clatter of Spanish syllables, while the woman says: “Twoo badh” in her dry, ironic voice.

I sit down at one of the big tables with the formica tops. Two old people sit huddled over the bar. Their faces are completely hidden. I assume they are a man and a woman from their clothes. They sip coffee in dead silence. It’s a working class crowd. I twist around and notice that most of the workers are Latino. Three wipe the floor with diligent attention.

Two twenty-somethings sit in the far corner, talking about college. “You’re going to finish up next semester? Is she going out with him?” I sit there while I wait for my order, letting the sounds enter my conciousness. Ping-pings of the adding machine. Creak of door. Clatter of kitchen utensils. The two young people are the only customers having a conversation. The rest sit in silence.

I finish the last of my sunny-side-up egg, and watch the middle-aged, overweight man at the next table who is eating grits, alone. His eyes roll strangely like old scientific globes. I also remember that he has not looked at anybody for the last fifteen minutes. He looks at the ceiling of the diner. He does not just stare — his eyes swivel and examine each part, minutely, desperately. I am drawn, against my will, to watch him.

Who is this man? Where is his home? Where is his family? What is he doing here, all alone, eating grits and searching the ceiling with the fascination of an agonized astronomer looking for the next comet? But I have been living in the States for too long, and have adjusted well. I have learnt to observe the insanities of the world with urban cool. So I continue to watch him without seeming to do so, looking at him and through him with the proper detachment. I do not get up, walk towards him, and ask him these three easy questions: Where’s your home? Who’s your father? Are you married? Those three famous questions with which Nepali men have stopped me in T-stops in London, in airplane flights to Doha, in Donut shops in suburban Palo Alto. He’s probably insane because he has been abandoned by the world in the most crowded city in the world. There is no point in drawing unnecessary attention to myself, so instead I look down, see the yellow yolk on the white ceramic plate. I lift the heavy fork and poke the tines into the perfect circle. As a stream of yellow flows out of the sunny-side-up egg, I scoop it up with a spoon and put it in my mouth with elaborate care, as if I were eating a precious aphrodisiac.

Who is this man? Where is his home? Where is his family? What is he doing here, all alone, eating grits and searching the ceiling with the fascination of an agonized astronomer looking for the next comet?

But now my attention is diverted to the other side of the room, where the old woman with the powder blue blouse, the pearl choker around her throat and white curls stands up on her booth. She turns towards the counter and starts talking with the desperate gaiety of a woman who has found a captive audience: “That man told me that he was raising the rent. What the hell do you think you are, I told him. I do not take that from a young man like you. He is usually such a gentleman, but today he told me to leave, and I gave him a piece of my mind. I am sorry I am shouting, but I had to tell you…” The loud and desperate gaiety is lost in the silence and low hum of the college students. People continue to eat, roll their eyes, sit motionless by the bar. They do not turn.

“You all right,” says the waiter as he walks by. I wonder if I am still half-asleep, still dreaming. He has asked me if I am all right with that concern that you show when somebody who is about to freak out. “Yes,” I reply, catching a glimpse of the man next to me rolling his eyes.

The boy who has been wiping the mud tracks on the floor comes by again, pulling a big mop behind him. The waitress, a tired looking young woman in a dirty apron, is asleep on the long, narrow bench. I walk towards the bathroom. By the time I come out, she is dressed. Coat with silver fur at the neck. Tall, dark red, leather heels. Her butt is encased in black velvet. She sways down the aisle that has been wiped for the umpteenth time since I walked in. I catch a last glimpse of her, swinging down the street in her designer sunglasses. A true hip New Yorker.

When I exit, I look into the diner one more time through the windows. The old lady in powder blue is visible through the grimy glass windows. She looks demurely down as she eats her bacon, a picture of bourgeois propriety. Behind her, a man sits and looks straight ahead. If I had not sat in front of him, I would never have known he was staring straight at the ceiling.