Since the English forced the Dutch to surrender New York in 1664, tens of millions of people from all over the world have sailed or flown across the Atlantic to escape old lives and begin new ones in one of the greatest cities of the world. The following tale, which includes profiles of three individuals in 'The Big Apple,' is fictional. Yet the places, the setting and the circumstances are all too real. These lives have been lived a countless number of times in both the history of the city and the history of the world..
To begin this story, let's go back one year to 2010 on July 9th. New York is sweltering under intense heat and humidity, and three people - Rasna Mehra, Michael Harris and Mariana Jose Barraza - are living with the condition. What is the condition? That is for you to try and divine (guess) as you read through these accounts. Here is a hint. Regardless of your gender, age, nationality or income level, you have had the condition at least once in your life. In fact, you may have it right now.
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Rasna Mehra, 9 July 2010
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Tonight in Brooklyn, a young Indian woman is sitting down to eat in her studio apartment -where she has lived for the past six and a half years. If you were sitting across from Rasna right now, you would be unable to miss a palpable aura inside the one room flat. It is enveloped in complete silence. This is how Rasna lives in the evenings after work.
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It never used to be this way. When she was born in the state of Punjab in India, her parents somehow, intuitively guessed that their first born child would be a natural talker. Hence, they named her Rasna - which means 'The Tongue.' They could not have been more right or prescient. From her first days as a baby, Rasna displayed 'the gift of gab' as they say. She simply talked to everyone - anytime, anywhere. If her spoken word production had been paid at a decent piece-rate scale, she would be at least fifteen times richer than Bill Gates by now. Due to her social nature, she talked with everyone in Punjab and picked up several Indian languages. Not only can she speak Hindi and Punjabi, but she can also converse fluently in Bengali, Kannada, Urdu and English. Over the last three months, she has advanced to an intermediate level in Spanish as well. Her Spanish instructor marvels at her ability to pick up grammar and remember vocabulary. She is convinced that Rasna will be proficient by the end of the year.
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As you might imagine, Rasna is extremely independent. Her parents wanted her to take over the family store after high school, but Rasna had other ideas. She was accepted to the Indian Institute of Technology in Raipur and graduated first in her class. What was her focus of study? Well, the title of her senior thesis said it all: 'Trends and Developments in Social Media Circles Worldwide, 2001-2003.' That, however, was eight years ago.
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Despite the fact that she speaks six languages (almost seven) and is on Facebook, Twitter and a dozen other social media sites, Rasna has had no desire to communicate with anyone recently. A few months before she graduated from IIT, she was informed who her husband would be by her parents under an arranged marriage. In fact, Rasna always liked the young man that her mother and father selected. They had grown up together. He was smart, kind and always well-dressed, but Rasna is a romantic at heart. She wanted to work abroad and try to meet the love of her life naturally. In a sense, her parents were not completely surprised when she rejected the marriage and subsequently told them of her intention of taking a job with a software firm in New York. Yet, they were a bit disappointed as well. While they never expressed that emotion to their only daughter, Rasna could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. It was subtle, but it was there.
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Since coming to New York, Rasna has dated several men - mostly Indian expatriates - but never felt truly intimate with any of them. In November 2009, her boyfriend of eighteen months raised the prospect of marriage over dinner at a famous Italian restaurant on the East Side. That was the first time she was struck by the condition. She had probably had the condition before, but the optimism of youth had always acted as a firewall against it. Not that night. After excusing herself from the dinner by saying she had a headache, she went home and cried for hours. Ever since that evening, the condition has been recurrent. Rather than go out with co-workers, Rasna can usually be found sitting alone, looking out the window, and wondering if her future is worth reaching. She is becoming more and more paralyzed by the condition, and she has no idea how to 'feel herself' again. Were her parents right? Should she have agreed to the arranged marriage? Is her life already ruined? These are the thoughts that now plague Rasna day in and day out.
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Michael Harris, 9 July 2010
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Michael is the equivalent of Rasna in the business world, but he is older. After taking an MBA from Harvard almost thirty-years ago, he started an advertising company on a shoestring budget and in a shoebox office on Madison Avenue. It originally had just one employee - himself. Now, his office is three floors, and he presides over more than 120 employees that are called 'associates.' How has Michael been able to succeed in one of the toughest businesses in New York? It all comes down to one word: competition. Since he was three years-old, Michael has wanted to be the best at everything, and he is truly relentless - and indefatigable. Sleep has always been optional.
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Only nine years subsequent to leaving Harvard, he made his first million. He worked nineteen or twenty hours a day, six days a week. On the seventh day, he rested - and only worked ten. When it came to his material life, he (of course) had to have the fastest car, the newest and biggest television, the most impressive house and the largest swimming pool in the neighborhood. And he got all of it. In regard to marriage, only a supermodel would do. He met his first wife at a fashion show in Paris. When she came down the runway, he imagined her walking down the aisle to him. And it happened. A huge wedding in Malta for their whole family and all of their friends ensued - along with a yacht cruise honeymoon, two perfect kids soon after and a divorce not long after that. Not surprisingly, Michael was almost never at home. For him, it was always about gaining marketshare and finding ways to reduce fixed costs for his advertising business in order to reach the $100 million mark - 'the beginning of serious money' as he was so fond of saying.
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He got married a second time to an even prettier woman - and then a third time to even prettier and younger woman than his second wife. She left him two weeks ago. Tonight, he is doing the same thing Rasna is doing in Brooklyn. He is sitting down to dinner alone. Unlike Rasna, however, he is alone in a giant house in Connecticut - eight bedrooms, five bathrooms and an Olympic-size pool in the backyard. Yet, Michael is also in a state of wonderment. Sure, he concedes to working too much. Then again, what choice did he have in the situation? 'It's a dog-eat-dog world out there,' he says to himself, adding 'If you're not first, your last.' That has been his motto since he can remember. Michael is neither a bad nor a shallow person, however. He truly loved his three wives, and loves his four children - but something has always been missing.
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Michael first realized he had the condition at age thirty-eight, and it has only gotten worse over the years. He has seen doctors dozens of times complaining of fatigue and chest-numbness. They all told him the same thing - stop working so much and take a vacation. Michael's ailment was unanimously ascribed to 'stress'. Every time he took a vacation, the condition only became more pronounced. When he was in St. Lucia last year for two weeks, he thought he was going to die from the condition. He felt a hundred times better in coming back to fifteen to nineteen hour days at the office.
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Last week, he sat down at a local coffee shop - just one week after losing his third wife to divorce - and did something he simply could not comprehend. He took out a piece of paper and wrote the following lines:
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if you have been given
a single moment of joy
it is one more moment
than you deserve
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After writing these words, Michael titled what appeared to be some kind of poem 'The Heart of the Matter.' He has read this poem every night since it was written, and he always asks himself the same question, 'How could I have written this?' His first poem has been more than an unexpected and inexplicable expression. It seems to be at least a temporary cure for the condition. Anytime he starts feeling unusually fatigued or has any chest-numbness, he reads his only poem - and his symptoms go away.
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Mariana Jose Barraza, 9 July 2010
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Mariana came into the world on 25 April 1983. Her birth was right in the middle of a civil war that ravaged her country, El Salvador, until 1992. When she was a little girl of seven years, she was abducted by a government-sponsored death squad and held for ransom. When her abductors discovered that her parents had been killed the very day they abducted Mariana in a spate of fighting outside of the capital (San Salvador), they turned her out into the streets. Luckily, a Catholic nun spotted her, and she was taken in by the church. Even more fortunately, her mother's sister, Mariana's aunt, was a naturalized American citizen in New York. Consequently, the nun was able to secure an American visa for her under a political asylum clause.
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It was difficult for Mariana to adjust to New York. She knew no English, and she knew no one except her aunt. For the first two years, she went to school but made little progress. Her ability was hampered, however, by a learning disability (unknown at the time) and episodes of depression. She often woke up at night screaming due to the violence she had witnessed and from the loss of her parents. Her father's last words echo through her mind everyday, 'Without you Mariana, my life would be a hollow shell.' At age ten in 1993, it was Mariana's life that turned out to be a hollow shell. That is when her aunt unexpectedly died from an undiagnosed tumor in her left breast. It had spread throughout her entire body within a very short time. Only a few weeks earlier, she had noticed a lump and felt some discomfort, but she dismissed the idea of cancer. 'How could I have cancer?', she thought. 'I'm only forty-one years old.' Besides, her employer did not provide health insurance, and she certainly did not have enough money to afford that 'luxury,' a word she used often to describe the health care most (but not all) middle-class, white European-Americans enjoyed - and took for granted.
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Upon her aunt's death, Mariana was placed in an orphanage. She remained there for two years and attended school. She received poor grades in all her classes, and some of the teachers became quite irritated when she failed to pay attention or turn in an assignment. They did not know of her learning disability. More importantly, they did not know of Mariana's daily agony of living - too much for anyone to handle - let alone a teenage girl. Sadly, these teachers made no attempt to connect to Mariana on human level. She was just one more person in an already overcrowded, nearly unmanageable classroom.
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So, Mariana just stopped going to school at age fourteen and found a job as a custodian at a local business. Of course, she had to lie about her age and say she was sixteen to get hired. No problem. Even if they had known her true age, they would have hired her anyway. For this company, cheap labor was deemed essential to maintaining high profits and large dividends for the shareholders. It was just a simple, unspoken practice of American life. That is how it worked. Period.
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For the next dozen years, Mariana scrubbed floors on her hands and knees and took occasional odd jobs around the city to support her lifestyle of living a rented room in one of the most dangerous areas of the city. On top of everything she had been through, she began developing the condition shortly after leaving school, and it has only become more of a factor in her life in recent years. Tonight, 9 July 2010, she is sitting next to a toilet on the third floor of the company where she works. The top of her head is on the toilet seat, and a chilling groan of pain has filled the cavernous, marble bathroom. It is Mariana. She is weeping years of anguish. In the back of her mind, she is asking herself one question over and over, 'What is the point of going on?'
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January 2011
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Mariana's answer came in the first month of 2011. On 4 January, she saw an advertisement for free ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at her local library. Anyone who wanted to improve their spoken and written English was invited to a general orientation. At the orientation, each 'student' would be paired up with a trained volunteer teacher. Four days later, Mariana went to the event, and she was assigned an instructor. Her name was Rasna. After only two sessions, Mariana and Rasna immediately hit it off due to being close in age and having some of the same struggles in America. Soon, they were meeting four times a week. Rather than a 'drain' on their energy, these meetings were having the opposite effect. They were inspiring each other. Rasna developed fun and logically-structured lesson plans, and Mariana studied as much as possible in her free time to avoid letting her new and only friend down.
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After week five, Rasna realized that Mariana was only semi-fluent in her native language (Spanish) as a result of the physical and emotional disruptions of her childhood. Fortunately, Rasna had indeed achieved full fluency in Spanish - just as her Spanish instructor had predicted, and she diplomatically asked Mariana if she would like to brush up on her native language. Rather than being offended, Mariana was overjoyed. As a result, their sessions were extended to five, one hour sessions from Monday to Friday. Sometimes, Rasna put Mariana on the spot and took her shopping. 'Okay Mariana,' she would say, 'first you are going to shop for clothes in English at this store, then we are going to another store where you are going to shop in Spanish.' Mariana had simulated a dialogue with a store clerk (Rasna) over and over in preparation. She had a list of questions for the clerks and hoped she would be able to understand all of their responses. More than ninety percent of time, she met or exceeded Rasna's - and her own - expectations. Rasna was amazed at her progress.
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April 2011
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Only three months later, a social worker that Mariana used to know from her early days in America phoned her completely out of the blue. Mariana was very happy to take the call. After she told him about her English and Spanish lessons, the social worker told her of a company executive that was looking for promising candidates to do a paid internship in the office of his company. In particular, the business owner wanted to reach out to people that most needed a break and would use the opportunity wisely. Beyond a salary, the owner was prepared to put up the interns at no cost in a fully furnished apartment in a building that he had purchased last year. Mariana could not believe it. It just sounded too good to be true. Nevertheless, she decided to interview for the position. 'What can it hurt?,' she rhetorically asked herself.
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Going into the interview, Mariana was nervous about her English. She knew that she would be meeting the owner of the company - as he conducted all the interviews personally. When Michael walked through the door and extended his hand, she felt as if she were going to faint right then and there. Forty-five minutes later, however, she got up, shook his hand to say thank you and thought about what she would wear on her first day at the office the following Monday. Mariana immediately phoned Rasna and blurted out the good news. 'His name is Michael Harris. I would say he is in his early sixties, and he must be the nicest man I have ever met! He was so warm and understanding that I forgot I couldn't speak English.' Rasna replied, 'Mariana, you can speak English. What do you think you are doing right now?' They laughed. Neither one of them had felt this happy in years - if ever.
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July 4th, 2011
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At the end of June, Michael told his ten interns that he was hosting a huge barbeque on July 4th in the backyard of his house and invited them to join him. When he said they were free to bring one or two guests along, Mariana called Rasna. And they went.
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It was a perfect day. The sun was shining, and not a single cloud dared cross the sky. Michael's huge Connecticut house was decked out in red, white and blue for Independence Day. His four kids were among the sixty guests in attendance. Everyone had fun. They threw frisbees around. They played volleyball, and most of all, they swam in his enormous pool.
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At the end of the evening, Michael stood up to address his visitors. He had always shied away from public speaking, but tonight, he could not be silent. When the guests quieted down, he began,
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'I just want to thank you all for coming here. It is my true privilege to have such good people at my home and in my life. Now, I hope you don't mind, but I need to share something with you. You see, all my life I have always had to be first in everything. I loved competition, and I loved winning even more. Despite becoming a successful businessman, a husband to three great wives (laughter) and a father to four wonderful kids, I had this condition. It is a condition that is hard to explain. It is a kind of numbness that would just come over me - often when I least expected it.'
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"Last year, I realized I was missing the core element of life itself, and that was the reason for the condition. Well, here is what I have discovered since then. I think I can sum it up in one sentence. 'In the absence of compassion and sacrifice, lies profound loneliness.' That was my condition. I no longer think about what I have been denied in life - but only what I have not given. Of course, I still experience the condition, but it is manageable through true living. And what is true living? It is people helping people. It is common decency. It is choosing understanding rather than judgment. Thank you for helping me understand this great truth."
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While the guests were applauding, Mariana looked at Rasna, and Rasna looked at Mariana. As tears began rolling down Mariana's face, she touched Rasna on the arm and said, 'Rasna, you and Michael saved my life! How can I ever repay you?' Rasna, who began crying at the same moment Mariana welled-up, replied, 'No Mariana, actually, I think you saved our lives.'
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Rasna, Michael and Mariana will always remember that July 4th. For that day was a true moment of joy.
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And that - is the heart of the matter.
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(Photo: New York City at sunset)
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J Roquen