Sacrifice and the City

Written by: Maisha Kazi

Sex and the City. If you’ve watched it, you already know that the characters lead pretty unrealistic lifestyles (and you probably hate Carrie Bradshaw too), yet you watch and obsess over New York anyway. The real themes of friendship, love, and loss prevail the fictionality. As I watched Carrie run in 4-inch heels across the streets of Manhattan through my laptop screen, I couldn't help but wonder: What is it about a city as cynical as New York that makes people fall so deeply in love with it?

In the show, the city’s signature bright yellow cabs often came to the rescue of Carrie and friends, who were either trying to flee an awkward situation or dramatically storm off from a fight with someone. But, instead of focusing on the character who hopped in, my eyes drifted toward the taxi driver, who is almost always a man of some South Asian descent. This is no surprise; I am used to seeing the roles of the cashier at the gas station or the taxi driver be portrayed by South Asians. But, when your very own father was also once a 20-something-year-old trying to make it in New York, the screen makes me feel a certain way. I don’t really know what the feeling is—anger at the stereotype, empathy towards the struggle, or just bittersweetness that my dad was also once in that driver’s seat.

My favorite thing to do is to ask my dad about what his life was like when he first arrived in New York. For someone who knows the city like the back of his hand, you would think he would have countless stories to tell—and he does!—but I don’t know much about his life chronologically. In typical dad-fashion, he prefers to reveal bits and pieces of himself sporadically. But, I don’t need an exact timeline to understand him. What I see in my dad’s eyes every time we are back in the city tells me everything I need to know about him and the Big Apple.

Don’t get me wrong, glitz and glamor does exist in Manhattan, the same kind that exists in the world of Carrie and Big. But for my dad, Manhattan was the place where he would earn  $10 a day working at a coffee shop, where he would see a Christmas tree for the very first time, and where he would drive working Manhattan professionals around from the morning into the night.

And there was (and is!) more than just Manhattan. There was his first apartment in the East Bronx. There were his four attempts to get a drivers license, which made him feel pretty defeated. There was his other job at Coney Island, all the way at the bottom of Brooklyn. And there was the budding Bengali community in Jackson Heights, Queens, which would soon become home for my family and the destination of many weekend visits growing up.

Like Carrie, my dad also had a tight knit group of friends that served as his support system in the relentless city of New York. Within a group of like-minded mid-to-late-20-year-old Bangladeshi folk who had also just moved to the States, my dad was able to find a piece of home in a place far from it.

When I think of New York, I think of love just like Carrie does, but a different type of love: I think of the love I have for my family, for my father and all of his sacrifices, and for every immigrant trying to get their footing in the city they have always dreamed of. Everytime our measly Toyota crosses over the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge and I can see the Manhattan skyline, I feel a deep sense of nostalgia for a place I’ve never lived in. My love for New York runs deep; it was the first place in the U.S. that my family was able to call home. And just like that, while watching Carrie run seamlessly over the potholes and cracks of Manhattan, I remembered what makes New York City so special to me and to anyone else who found their roots there.