Double

I haven't written in a long time, and in the intervening period a lot of things have happened. Most of them have actually been happy things, but there is one thing that happened at home that has been especially worrying. We live and learn. But the important thing is that we live.

My mind is pregnant (in the sense of Plato's Diotima) with things to say, but I don't have much energy to say it. I guess this will be rather short.

*

Two weeks ago, A, M, S, a few of their friends and I went down to Midtown to see the Rockefeller Centre Tree Lighting Ceremony: you know, the famous giant tree that's placed above the famous skating rink. We headed down right after classes, but by the time we got there, the surrounding streets had already been blocked off by the NYPD for crowd control, and there was no way to get to a spot where the tree itself could be seen. And thinking that it would not be very fun to stand out in the cold watching a Jumbotron big-screen squeezed in with teenagers screaming at Jessica Elba et al (Britney Spears cancelled at the last minute), we headed back uptown instead for a spot of dinner.

We found this quaint Ethiopian restaurant up on 122nd, and decided to give it a try. The meal cost about $15 per person, but considering the quality and quantity of the food, it's a real steal. Fragrant meats and vegetables stacked into steaming mounds on a platter so large that it warms your heart just looking at it, on a bed of flat roti-like bread with more flat bread on the side. You eat with your hands, tearing off a piece of bread and picking up portions of the dishes. The warmth of the food seeps into your fingertips, and the scents are sensually felt. And after all the dishes are gone, you eat the bed of bread, which has soaked up all the gravies, and that makes for a satisfying dessert.

And of course, the company was great as well. Sometimes you're lucky to meet people that you can get along with handsomely from the beginning, and the conversation flowed so easily around that laden table. It was an easy night, one of the last nights before the final exams when we could be at ease and linger over food talking into the night. Every day, there has been a sense of urgency, and lingering is quite a luxury. To linger: to appreciate; indeed, to savour the moment - that is a challenge and an art.

*

The other big news is, of course, that it's snowing in New York. It started about two weeks ago. Y, J, W and I had just come out of a concert of mediaeval Christmas songs from the nearby Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and suddenly we noticed that there were white flakes falling from the sky. We - well, at least I - freaked, and as we walked down the street back to Columbia, I was sticking my tongue out like someone out of a Charlie Brown cartoon trying to catch a flake of New York snow (I'm told it's not recommended for health reasons). We were meant to be studying, but the dusting of white compelled me, J and W to keep walking into the night. We went all the way up to Harlem, eating a cut of frozen yogurt on the way (because cold things taste better in cold weather).

And yesterday, it snowed really hard, until visibility was reduced to just under 20m. The weather's so cold outside that the snow's still there this morning. The season lends itself to such things as snowball fights and snowman-building, and throughout last night you could hear intermittent squeals and screams as girls were hit by flying snow. The snowmen have been sprouting like mushrooms, and right in front of my dorm is a veritable igloo, with well-shaped blocks and an entranceway. All the rooftops around are covered with white. All you need is for a universal soundtrack of Christmas carols, and you won't be able to resist being happy.

*

And to mark the end of term, we had another steamboat in one of my hall's lounges, running down to Chinatown right after the last paper to buy the food and coming back to the chopping and cleaning and marinating. We actually did a really good job, I think, especially when Ja whipped up a very commendable marinade for the chicken, which transformed it from food into a delicacy. We're quite lucky, too, to have met this boy from Queens. Without his culinary skills, we'd really be rather high and dry foodwise.

With the weather becoming colder outside, and with the finals just ended, and with the holidays stretching ahead, pleasantly uncommitted, it was exactly what I needed to be with familiar people and eating a communal meal. This steamboat reminded me so clearly of the meals we had at home - meals that my family are, I trust, still having at home. I am, of course, in such a different context and so far away from them. But I have been unbelievably lucky here, especially to meet all these people. You get your family wherever you can have them. And the most important thing this holiday season, after all the academic and professional distractions have died down, is to be together with people you know and care about.

Here, then, is a group of people that I have come to care very deeply about.

*

And on Thursday morning, suddenly I get a message on my phone saying that P, E and K from UPenn were in town and looking for things to do. So we hooked up with them to show them around town. Went to Times Square and walked down to Macy's hunting for cheap clothes, and then made a mad dash up 10 blocks back to 45th Street, a street lined with theatres, to watch August: Osage County. It was a mind-blowing piece of drama about a family dealing with the (apparent) suicide of their father. It was spectacular: they'd built an entire cutaway dollhouse on the stage, and the characters wandered in and out of it, from room to room, up and down stairs, lights turning on and off in a disconcertingly familiar way. And amidst all this, a morbidly fascinating family drama played out, with the daughters competing to see who has had the happiest life, trying to hide their insecurities and neuroses from each other, and with the mother descending into willful dementia that brings about cutting lucidity and violent veracity.

It was especially hard to watch this drama, particularly when the family started to tear into each other over the funeral dinner, because just before the steamboat the previous night, just after I completed my last exam, I'd received word from home about one of my close relatives being hospitalized for a stroke. This is, of course, extremely worrying in and of itself, but I've mentioned before that for someone going far away from home, such a happening is especially fearsome. Of course, I understand that at this point in time there's not much anyone can do except wait to see what's going to happen, but it is also important to simply be there, especially for his family. And, stuck as I am 13 timezones away with only a few hundred dollars for the rest of the month, there is no practicable way to be there for them at the moment, unless I do something drastic. And given the current situation, something drastic may be called for. Times like these, you realise the importance of being present, just to be there to share the pain.

It's a strange position that I'm in right now. I of course join my family in clinging on to the hope that my uncle recovers, and I join them too in my concern for his family and how they are holding up. But I have the luxury of distance; if I wanted to, I could escape from these worries and immerse myself in what there is to do around me in New York. Thirteen timezones does tend to reset your perspective on things. I'm sure that my family back home also don't want to keep thinking about this, but it is so much more immediate for them: all it takes is a phone call or SMS to spread the news if anything more happens. It is, I guess, a sense of guilt for being so far away when something like this happens. Not the guilt of escaping, per se, but the guilt of possessing the means to escape if I wanted to. And I see that, from a certain point of view, there is not much of a difference between the two.

So it was, then, that it was especially hard to watch August: Osage County with this hanging over my head. It was a funny play, sharp and witty, but I kept getting the eerie sense that there was a meaning reserved only for me that I was decoding because of my own personal history. There was an especially disturbing moment when, after the father goes missing, one of his daughters grabs the shoulders of her own daughter out of the blue, and demands, "Die after me." "Live," she implored. How am I supposed to read this, especially in the light of...no, the rest is too private.

One is faced with two options here, I guess: to focus on the imminence of death, or to go for its antithesis, to take the former as motivation to focus on the living of life. And I guess you have to choose the latter. The dead don't care about dying anymore, and if you focus on the former you're practically experiencing a part of your own death prematurely. I mean, moments like these call for you to commit to life, don't they? Not only to life, but to the continuous active verb form: living. Maybe it's a mental trick for me to reconcile the opportunities I find around me with the tragedy that's playing itself out at home. Maybe it's flimsy excuse to carry on as if nothing's happened, in the face of imminent catastrophe. But to choose to live on, I think, is deeply important. It is one of the choices that we make that keep us one step ahead of being merely passive victims of chance and fate and whatnot. It is one of the choices, one of the very few choices, that can instill meaning into every moment, in a postmodern context.

And so, it was especially important, I think, that these last few days be well spent, both as the best way for me to help my family at the moment (so that they don't worry about me while they worry about my uncle as well), and, if I may be so bold, as the best way to pay tribute to all that has happened before that has led up to this. For certainly, my uncle has played a part in how I have ended up here, in my 21st year of life, and for me not to take everything to the fullest is a sort of betrayal of his involvement.

So, after the play, brought P, K, E, G, J and W to the Jap bar that I'd gone to with another group of friends over Thanksgiving, and there we sent off the first semster in style, tucking into yakitori, ramen, udon and several other unsayable (and unspeakable) things. We also polished off two bottles of sake, coming up to about 3.6 litres of the stuff between the seven of us. This stuff is a great drink, but rather dangerous, because it goes down so easily that you don't really notice that you're getting intoxicated. Eventually, we managed to stumble our way out of the bar and wound up in the subway, somehow. As usual, the New York subway was in the process of breaking down, and we couldn't go any further than 42nd Street. J and W brought the rest to the surface to go back to Columbia by cab, while I had to stay with K, because he was too woozy to move, and instead spent about half an hour slumped over on a subway staircase, attracting the concerned stares of passersby and two NYPD officers.

Ultimately, though, we ended up back at Columbia and slept it off. And yesterday, brought them down to Union Square to do some shopping. It was heavily snowing in the morning, which was really pretty, but in the afternoon it couldn't make up its mind whether to snow or to rain or to hail, and it was quite the challenge to walk around Union Square, jumping colossal puddles, ducking cars and practically skating across sidewalk glaciers. Dropped the rest at the Strand while I brought P nearby to do some last-minute shopping. And then, after enjoying a wonderful cup of hot chocolate from the original Max Brenner's at Union Square, brought them back to where they'd dumped their luggage and then sent them off in their car to the airport.

It was, of course, great fun to have the UPenn people down for these couple of days, and it was great to be able to get out into the city again. But there were moments of surreal irony, when the joy of the moment was thrown into sharp contrast with the worry and the dread that I imagine must permeate the atmosphere back home. It is hard to reconcile the experienced happiness and the projected sadness back home. It makes everything that is happening now around me much more poignant: the steamboat, the rowdy night at the bar, the trek through the awful weather around Union Square, even the quiet hours of studying in regional libraries before the exam, the walks back to campus in the nights, the simple pleasures of rambling conversations over food. It makes it so much more important, now, to experience everything as fully as possible. And of course, to wait with hope.

We shall see what happens next.