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An Indian In Times Square

Amitava Kumar

I went to Times Square a few hours before the ball was to drop down on the last millennium.

I was on assignment to take pictures of Indians partying there. I met among others two software programmers from Madras who, coincidentally, had come to this country to work on Y2K problems. Later that evening, a record crowd packed the streets, chanting together the countdown to the final seconds of a passing era.

By then, I was in my car on the New Jersey Turnpike, listening to the news on my radio. I heard then of the release of the passengers on the hijacked Indian Airlines flight. It was only on hearing that happy news that it struck me that the new year had already arrived in India.

As Indians living abroad, we live in a divided time. Time is split between India and the country we live and work in.

But, there are also other divisions that fracture time. I was reminded of this on New Year's Day when I opened the Washington Post. The paper's editors had asked a hundred readers to tell them who they were at the turn of the new age. I scanned the printed portraits of those readers till I had found an Indian face. This is what I read in her account:

"I am from India. We came to America with a dream to give our boys the best life. We sacrificed our settled life in our home country for our boys. One son, 19, met a much older woman who has two children from two different fathers. We asked him to complete his education before getting involved.

He said, 'Go to hell. Stop calling me.' There is no bigger sorrow than to hear these words from your loved ones."

The fracture between tradition and modernity, or between families and generations, is not particular to Indians alone. The global society we inhabit today is marked by widening schisms.

And it cannot be denied that shifts in era, like the end of a millennium, provide easy, sometimes banal, way of taking stock of what is changing around us. On Times Square that evening, what was changing the most was time itself.

We have calendars because we want to mark time. Time seems to slow down when we are measuring it. If you were in Times Square on the last day of 1999, you were conscious also of how fast time passes.

Electronic boards everywhere flashed the millennium countdown. The clocks of yore shifted their hands each minute, allowing time enough to cross the street or light and puff a cigarette. There has been a noticeable change.

Digital machines, like the ones near Times Square, now record the rapid passage of time in its smallest readable portions.

It is now possible to almost ignore the enormity of time, which is to say, time itself.

When I dived back into the 42nd Street subway station, I saw the tight bunches of blue-clad NYPD policemen. No doubt the cops were there in such large numbers to tell anyone otherwise if they slipped into thinking that they had stepped into another time.

On taking my seat on the Times Square shuttle, I saw an announcement on the train's wall. Here too was a reminder about time, and the violence of the world got attached to the violence of time passing.

The announcement read: "Every 12 seconds another woman is beaten by her husband or boyfriend."

Would this terrible reality caught in the narrow space of twelve seconds change in the new millennium? Or, for that matter, how differently did time beat on this statistic in the country of my birth?

The questions that had been provoked by my visit to Times Square continued to grow and multiply as I listened to the news.

The newsreader mentioned in a steady baritone that the US had handed back the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. Before I could reflect on this particular fragment of the history of US hemispheric dominance -- that is to say, before I had the time to think about it -- the news report had already moved on to another item of attention. In the city of New York, on a daily basis, the police receives nine fake bomb threats.

On the last day of the year, the police had fielded calls far in excess of that number.

In San Francisco earlier that day, a man had called the airport with a bomb threat to help his girlfriend, who was running late, catch her flight. For the next ten years, the newsreader added, the man will be in jail serving time.

Amitava Kumar is the author of Passport Photos, soon forthcoming from the University of California Press.

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