Everyone said — leave the car in Philadelphia, take the train.
I followed the advice, which for someone who had spent the better part of this trip ignoring plans and inventing alternatives, felt like a small act of maturity. The Jetta was returned. I boarded the train. New York arrived the way New York always does — suddenly, loudly, without preamble, as if it had been there all along and you were the one who had taken too long.
I had been here before. In 2013, I had stayed with a friend in Brooklyn — the New York of neighbourhoods and bridges and a slightly more human scale. This time I was on my own, and I had made a decision before I arrived. I was going to stay in Harlem.
The reasons were known and unknown to me, even as I made the choice. Maybe it was the name and its ring — Harlem, a word that carries its own music. Maybe it was the stories, the history, the Harlem Renaissance and everything it had meant for Black art and culture and identity in America. Maybe it was simply that after days of rust belt loneliness and West Virginia woods and Philadelphia's revolutionary ghosts, I wanted to be somewhere that felt unguarded. Somewhere with no pretence.
Harlem delivered. And then some.
It hugged me from day one.
I stepped out for lunch and found Sylvia's — the famous soul food restaurant on Lenox Avenue that has been feeding Harlem since 1962. The food was the kind that makes you understand immediately why it is called soul food — generous, warm, deeply seasoned, the culinary equivalent of a tight embrace. I ate well. I felt welcomed by the meal itself.
The days that followed had their own rhythm. Mornings on 125th Street, walking up and down the spine of the neighbourhood, ducking into small museums and bookshops that rewarded the unhurried browser. The Apollo Theatre — that legendary stage where Ella Fitzgerald won her first amateur night, where James Brown recorded a live album, where Harlem's cultural heartbeat has been measured for nearly a century. I stood outside it for a while, then went in, then stood some more.
In the small parks, people sat and smoked and danced with the particular joy of people who have decided that joy is not something to be postponed. No occasion required. No audience needed. An afternoon, a park bench, some music and some weed, and the simple business of being alive in a neighbourhood that knows how to live. I watched, I absorbed, I was grateful to be allowed to witness it.
Harlem Nights — the club — gave me an evening of exactly what the name promises. The neighbourhood, I discovered, does not perform its warmth. It simply has it, the way some people do, effortlessly and without thinking about it.
I had wanted, badly, to watch Hamilton on Broadway.
Alexander Hamilton — the immigrant who became the first Secretary of the Treasury, the man whose portrait I had seen on the ten dollar bill, whose story had been turned into a musical that the whole world seemed to have seen except me. Hamilton Grange, his home in Harlem, was one of my stops — the modest house where the great man had lived, tucked improbably into the neighbourhood that now carries his story in ways he could not have imagined. I visited. I paid my respects.
But Hamilton the musical was sold out. Completely, finally, unapologetically sold out.
I settled for Chicago at Broadway instead, which turned out to be no settling at all. The show was sensuous — a pure delight for the senses, jazz and style and showmanship woven together into something that made you understand why Broadway is Broadway. I left the theatre buzzing in the way that only live performance, done at its absolute best, can produce.
Dinner one evening was at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company at Times Square — touristy, cheerful, entirely unapologetic about being both, the shrimp excellent and the Times Square circus doing its thing outside the windows. I ate and watched the world perform itself.
Central Park I visited several times, each time finding a different version of it — the early morning park, the afternoon park, the park at that hour when the light goes golden and everyone seems to slow down slightly, as if by agreement.
I went up to Brooklyn — back to the borough that had housed me in 2013, familiar and changed at once, the way places you have known always are.
And then, towards the end of the week, I went looking for the Ashram.
The Self Realisation Fellowship in New York — the ashram of my guru, a quiet address in the middle of one of the loudest cities on earth. I had been moving for weeks. Airports and highways and mountain roads and ghost tours and soul food and Broadway and Harlem parks. I had covered ground — physical, emotional, spiritual — in quantities I had not fully accounted for. I needed, before the journey ended, to find my centre.
I found it there. A few moments of meditation, of genuine silence, of stillness that the city outside seemed to agree not to disturb. The kind of quiet that you can only fully appreciate after a great deal of noise. I sat. I breathed. I let the journey settle into me rather than chasing after the next thing.
It was, in its way, the most important stop of the entire trip.
The departure was quiet. A morning flight, the city still finding its feet as I made my way to the airport. No fanfare, no ceremony. The jajabara does not end with a bang — it simply becomes the past, which is where all good journeys eventually live.
Home and family were waiting.
That is both the simplest and the most complete thing I can say about why the road, however wonderful, is always something you leave. The wandering is real, the freedom is real, the loneliness and the beauty and the toothless signposts and the farmers and the Harlem parks and the Chesapeake Bay from above — all of it real, all of it worth every mile.
And yet.
S was waiting. The life I had left temporarily was waiting. India, with its noise and its chaos and its petrol station attendants who fill your tank and clean your windshield and ask — cash, card or UPI — was waiting.
I had driven from Normal, Illinois to Virginia on roads that run the heart of America. I had been lost in West Virginia woods and found by a farmer. I had eaten soul food in Harlem and watched Chicago on Broadway and sat in silence in an ashram and stood on a wooden deck over still water and rolled a cigarette and been, for a few weeks, entirely and completely free.
The road gives you that. And then it gives you back.
I was ready to go home.
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