Human of New York

May 14, 2009. 12 pm. Flushing Chinatown, Queens, New York City.

I had just landed on the railroad station from Long Island. Somehow, my air ticket from Chicago to there was cheaper than to LaGuardia or JFK. Although had I known what would happen with me there over the course of the next sixty minutes, I would have gladly spent those fifty bucks extra.

It was quite cold when I flew from Chicago early that morning, but as I dragged my three pieces of luggage to the side, I quickly added a fourth one by taking off my jacket and my pointy hat to the blazing sunshine of New York. I had to go down the stairs of the station, but as I turned to ask someone to lend me a hand with my luggage, I realized that my fellow passengers had vanished as swiftly as wizards and witches do through that barrier between Platform Nine and Ten at the King’s Cross Station in London. So I sneaked under a shade and called my friend who was going to pick me from there. He happily gave me bad news on the phone.

My friend had to go pick his sister from college, and the other car was with his dad who wouldn’t get off from work until 8 pm. So I had to get a cab and go to his place where, he chuckled, his mom had prepared a scrumptious Pakistani lunch for me to compensate for my semester-long starvation for desi food. It was easy, I was not a baby, and it was New York. He hung up with the sincere warning that life moved fast there and I could fall behind if I didn’t keep pace. So I decided to take that one small step which, he promised, would turn into a giant leap across the Big Apple that night. I wasn’t home alone then; I wasn’t even home yet, but, oh dear, I was about to get lost in New York City. At the exact, same spot.

There, on May 14, 2009, around 1 pm, the humans of this world saw two people walking down the road

Cursing under my breath, I half-dragged, half-kicked my bags down the steps and sat upon them as soon as I landed. Then I wiped my glasses and goggled around me; everyone who caught my eye goggled back. They were all Asian people, and for the first time since my arrival in the United States, I realized the fallacy of the maps taught to me: Pakistan was not a part of Asia and Chinatown was not a part of America.

Nobody over there spoke English. I just had to ask where I could find a cab but the people looked at me like I was inquiring whether a turtle would actually win a race from a rabbit. I tried to explain in sign language what I needed, but they simply gulped at that and gazed back at me. Maybe they thought I was high at noon. I tried to act like a driver and swung my arms to imitate the motion of a steering wheel, but they took that as some moves from my native dance and copied the same gesture back for me, to an amazing degree of perfection. Finally, I drew the picture of a taxi on a paper, pointed out to it, and blinked with a puppy face. But they clapped to admire my piece of artwork, nodded strongly, and one of them gave me an approving pat on my back. I took that thump as the most sophisticated way in the world to kick someone’s negligible butt.

Defeated, I withdrew myself to a corner and started pra(e)ying for Americans. I mean the people who looked like sort of natives. After about twenty minutes, rescue arrived. I rushed to meet him with the speed of light. My savior, however, disappointed me more than my girlfriend’s father had ruined our first date. He was on old man, looked really tired, and whistled with every word he spoke, or he thought he spoke, since a strong majority of his speech was occupied solely by the letter S. With all his graciousness, I could only learn that the nearest place to catch a cab was about a quarter of a mile from there and the only way to get there was on foot. Unless, I could conjure a bicycle right there with all those notes of that song of magnificent despair.

I am not sure if you guys realize the complexity of my situation yet, but even if you do not, please be assured that the problem was both simplified and amplified now. I had to carry my luggage and myself along to the taxi stand, and there was no way in the world I could do that in one go. Either I had to find someone who would carry a bag for me, or I had to deposit half my stuff there with someone while I went to find the cab with my other half. And either of these solutions was rendered impossible by the fact that I was consistently failing to find anyone who spoke English and everyone was consistently failing to understand my feeble attempts at other modes of communication.

Loneliness is not when you lose someone or have a break up in your life; it is when you are looking at the dazzling troop of strangers swarming around you under the piercing heat of the sun, and nobody speaks to you a word about how you are going to make it from there, or even offers you a space under their umbrella, neither when the sky is standing clear on top of you and nor when it is clouded with the torrential waters of oceans pouring down upon your head. In the space of about two years that I lived in the United States, this was the only time I felt discriminated. It feels almost unreal to call it that, and it seems an exaggeration to call this situation a real dilemma, but those were some of the most terrible minutes of my life. And almost in the same surreal way, they were about to be followed by some of the most beautiful minutes, that I will continue to cherish for the rest of my life.

About an hour after I had landed at that eventful station, I saw a woman walking down the way where I stood. She was middle aged, walked slowly, and was an African American. I automatically ran up to her, hardly even greeted her, and blurted out my story of agony. She widened her eyes, stood back, and gave me a deep smile. After a pause of a few seconds, she said, “Stop looking so worried, young boy. I’ll carry them with you. You sure you can walk though? You don’t look that good.” I was shocked. I did not expect her to solve my problem with four sentences. Although I was saved, there was no way in the world I could let her carry my bags with me. This woman was almost the age of my mother, and who would have their mother carry their son’s luggage like that. I told her this, and the answer she gave checkmated me to wake up to the colossal reality of the universal idea of maternity, an expansive sense of charity, and the indefatigable bond that tied all of us together as humanity. She said, “If a mother can carry her son while he waits to be born, she sure can carry his bag when he has grown big enough to own one.”

And there, on May, 14, 2009, around 1 pm, below the railroad station, Flushing Chinatown, Queens, New York City, the humans of this world saw two people walking down the road: a shell-shocked boy about to depart from his teen years, holding his jacket, his pointy hat, and his bag, a middle-aged woman looking thoroughly amused, dragging his other bag along, and a third bag, holding out its one end to the boy and the other to the woman, and carelessly oscillating between them with an unwavering assurance of getting home. This walk took about fifteen minutes, I guess, and while none of us spoke a word during that, with every inch of the time and space we covered, I was bombarded with a new perspective, of looking at things around, and inside me. I am not sure if any other walk I would ever take in my life would matter so much in making me the person I became with that one, although I really wish that happens.

I was speechless as we reached the taxi place, she called out a cab and the driver stuffed my bags inside. I simply held out my hand, blabbered something like thank you so much, but she didn’t reply back. She just gave me a crushing bear hug, waved and walked away. I was so exhaustively engrossed in that process of immense transformation, that I am not sure I even remember her name now. So I would call her “Mama Jenny”. I got this name from an Indian movie, and probably fittingly enough, because my cab driver who dropped me to my friend’s home was also Indian, and that day he did not charge me a penny for taking me down there. There are plenty of moments that happen in life which make or break a man, but those set of moments that happened over there that day, I swear, left me infinite, forever.

Five years later, I am back home, in Lahore, Pakistan. It is the last part of the night and soon, there will be the call for the morning prayer. We would be invited to find guidance, success and, if we can, God. But God can be found – from the mosque to the temple, from the bar to the brothel, from the cradle to the grave – through only love. And love lives only inside the heart of us. And it is this inexplicable beatings of the billions of hearts across the world, that pitch in to resonate a single voice that calls us, every second of our life, to find each other and, through us, Him. It is what keeps us moving when we fall down, it is what helps this world go everyday through the titanic toils of tyranny and terror, and it is the only part of us that is immortal, since its notes can be heard even after the beatings have stopped. This voice is something which we have to more than love; we have to live it, for it is this which keeps us human.

I am trying to gather the echoes of this voice as I sit here on my computer, looking at the pictures Brandon Stanton posted about the humans of Pakistan. I look at Sayyada Fatima, who, together with Brandon, stood up to shatter the shackles of slavery here and to live the idea of human beings like how they were born: free, equal, and just. I look at Mama Jenny, a human of New York, who rescued a Pakistani. I look at Abdul Sattar Edhi, a human of Pakistan, who could not save, but who collected with his hands, what was left of Daniel Pearl by the terrorists. But then I also turn to look at them who had murdered that gem of a human who had come to Pakistan only to do his job. I look at the faces of the children who have died here, in drone attacks and in the suicidal ones carried out in the name of revenge for the former. I look at the memorials of the victims of 9/11, where it all began. And I see a colossal splitting of the human society between the fog of war and the seeds of peace.

About four years ago, I was showing some really pretty girls of my college pictures from Pakistan. I was almost about to impress them when my friend called out, “So is this the mountain behind which Osama bin Laden lives?” Less than a week later, the US Navy Seals killed Osama in Abbottabad. I never met those girls again, and I thought they would never take me seriously if I ever did. But then, Brandon came. He showed us the mountain behind where Osama lived – the majestic beauty of Pakistan and its humans, which has remained undefeated after fourteen years of the perpetuating war on terror and unending after the fifty thousand lives it has claimed. He showed America, and the rest of the world, that Pakistan has humans who are not the exporters of extremism, but the torchbearers of one of the earliest human civilizations. He showed everyone how the white part in the Pakistani flag remained representative of peace, and how, in the light of the crescent and the star, it could stand to make the entire world go green. And after Brandon told the true romance about the story of Pakistan, it was incumbent upon me to tell my country, and everyone else, that thousands of miles away, bearing a different colour, culture and country, a woman about five and a half feet tall lived, who towered above the highest building in that megacity. I had to tell my people that while they hear stories of how Homeland ruined their country in the show, the biggest Fulbright Program run by the taxes of the American people remained for them. I had to tell them that while Daniel Pearl’s parents cried for their child, they also cried for every child the Pakistani parents lost that catastrophic day in the school at Peshawar. I had to tell everyone that what united us as humans was much more than what divided us as entities, and that how incredibly important it was for all of us to construct our levels of identities in the right order. If we could understand only this bit about ourselves, I learned all these years, we could very well not only win life, but also haunt death, when we finally walk out to meet her.

I sit here writing these lines, and I am not even sure if Mama Jenny would ever read them. But that would not stop me from writing them, because if there is one thing that she has taught me, it is that wherever in the world a child needs his mother, she would pop up in front of him. And although this child she met at that railroad station six years ago has grown up now, as long as he lives, he will continue to respect her as much as he respects his own mother.

Sohaib is a student of Political Science and International Relations at Lahore, Pakistan. His interests include writing, traveling and meeting new people. He aims to make a career in diplomacy and conflict resolution and work for world peace. Sohaib can be reached at www.facebook.com/sohaibi.stewie