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Lost in New York, Part 1


During the summer of '94, I worked for a research center about
40 miles away from New York City. What follows is a personal
account of my experiences this summer. I hope to make this the 
first of a small series.

-Vivek

Lost in New York
----------------

Part 1: Heading off Starvation, and a trip to the temple

I arrived in the city of Pleasantville, NY on a weekend, with not
a whole lot of food. It had been a 4 day drive, and the lasagne
that a devotee friend of mine had made for me was close to
exhausted. I had also managed to buy some vegetarian bagels before
I left Houston, but they too were almost gone. I needed to do some
shopping quickly if I wanted to eat.

Our company had made dormitory arrangements for us at a nearby
college, if we wanted to pay the $120/week room & board. Since
I had no other option, I had signed up, knowing that there were
kitchen facilities in the dorm. I expected the food to be dismal,
and I wholely expected to eat all manner of boiled, tasteless
vegetable until I was able to get set up.

Much to my amazement, it turned out that "board" included no
meals! Luckily for me, one of the guys in the dorm had been
here a previous year, and he knew of a nearby Indian restaurant.
Dinner was taken care of, but the $15 per person bill wasn't making
me very happy. Unfortunately, there weren't a whole lot of restaurants
in the nearby area, so I would have to learn how to cook.

I had taken the precaution of buying a used copy of Yamuna Devi's
"Art of Indian Vegetarian Cuisine" from the Hare Krishnas. It's
a pretty thick book, and it was well worth the $15 I paid for it
(half price). I knew basically nothing about cooking, so I thought
it would come in handy, which it did.

That first week cooking in the dorms was a real lesson. I had grown
accustomed to the luxury of homecooked meals and temple food, and I
was quite unprepared to cook for myself. I had spoken with Krishna
Kripa das, a devotee at the Houston temple, before I left, and he 
told me that he learned how to cook in the back of a van while they 
toured the country distributing books. I thought that I would have a 
much easier time since I had access to a small kitchen. I was wrong.

There were two girls in the program who had come straight from Korea,
and within a week, they had also discovered the kitchen facilities.
Apparently, no Korean meal is complete without a generous dose of
fish sauce. I had the misfortune of having the room closest to the
kitchen, and the smell of fish sauce overpowered most of the hallway
every night. I resorted to using the kitchen facilities two floors
down, and I stuffed towels under the door whenever they cooked.

At first, I tried to get some people interested in cooking, with the
hopes that we could all take turns cooking. For about a week, I made 
copious quantities of food, and invited a few other guys to dig in.
They were really surprised at how good vegetarian food could be, but
they didn't really seem interested in cooking. Every afternoon, most
of the guys would get back from the office and watch television until
about 9 pm. At that time, the kitchen would suddenly become busy with
various pots boiling corn, or boiling vegetables, or boiling pasta.
Most people cooked very little meat, since they didn't have cars or
refrigerators.

In the first few days at work, I met some fellow Indians and got the
address of a nearby Indian grocery store. It was expensive, but it
was my only reasonable option. I also had a car, so between the spices
from the Indian store and the fresh vegetables that I was buying every
day at the regular grocery store, I was able to have decent food every
night.

There wasn't much to do in the area other than try to find the basic
necessities. New York city was only 40 miles to the south, so I decided
to go exploring. A good friend of mine, Jay, had an apartment in Manhattan,
so I had a place to stay in the city whenever I desired.

That weekend I decided to go into New York City, and to find the temple.
I had no problem getting the address and phone number of the temple, since
it was listed in the back of the Bhagavad Gita that I had. I called them
and got directions, which seemed pretty simple. With a little luck, I was
able to find the temple, which was in Brooklyn.

The temple is located in a part of Brooklyn which I think is called
"Flatbush". As it turns out, Flatbush is not the nicest nor the safest
part of New York, but I didn't have any problems in my many trips to
the area. On Jay's advice, I opted to take a train into the area rather
than drive. I'm not particularly good at finding things, so I stumbled 
around a few streets before I found the temple.

The temple was formerly a synagogue, but I get the impression it must
have been abandoned some time back. The neighborhood is predominantly
Black now, and I didn't see any signs of Jewish residents or stores
there anymore. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the temple
was that it was huge.

The Hare Krishna Temple in Houston is a relatively small building, which
was a former church. This building was massive, and the main hall looked
like it could easily hold 1000 people. There were also upper and lower
levels, so I decided to do some exploring. The lower level has two main
dining areas and a kitchen. I found a devotee in the kitchen and we spoke
for a little while. It turned out that I was quite a bit early for the
evening program, and some tables needed to be rearranged, so I soon
found myself arranging tables. A note to the wise - if you show up at
a Hare Krishna temple in the middle of the day, you will find that you
usually can get the opportunity to perform some form seva. 

After a little devotional service, I decided to go catch the start of
the evening program. The curtains had been opened, and I got to pay
obeisances to the deities of Sri Sri Radha Govinda. They were beautiful
deities, and the altar was very nicely decorated, if a bit smaller
than I would have expected.

I also got the opportunity to see some of the full-time devotees. In
Houston, the temple is run almost exclusively by grihastas (householders),
so saffron-clad brahmacharis are a rare sight. There were now at least
five or six of them performing kirtan, and more devotees were beginning 
to come in.

The Hare Krishna temple in Houston is almost completely Indian. On
Sunday night, there are generally about 5% non-Indians. Here, the temple
was about 50/50, and I soon learned that many of the American devotees
had been initiated by Swami Prabhupada - they had been Hare Krishnas 
about as long as I'd been alive. The age spectrum was quite spread
out, and I was quite pleased to meet many devotees in their twenties.
Quite a few of them were American, and the men were wearing dhotis for
the most part, while the women were wearing full saris. Here I was, born
in India, in a Hare Krishna temple in New York, and I was wearing jeans.
Oh, the irony.

While the kirtan was going on, I was looking around at the people in
the crowd. I recognized on face immediately, and he saw me as well. He
was Sura das, a devotee from Bombay who was in the US for a short time.
He had come to the Houston temple about 2 months ago, and I met him
almost entirely by accident. I was at the temple one afternoon when we
got a phone call from the airport. It turned out that two devotees were
coming into Houston that day and needed a ride from the airport to the
temple. Somehow matters had gotten mixed up and they were stranded. Since
I was the only one at the temple who wasn't doing anything at the moment,
I was volunteered to pick them up.

I went to the airport and saw them waiting outside. I apologized for
the confusion and for their being stranded, but they were completely
calm and peaceful. It turned out that by the time I had picked them
up at the airport, they had been waiting for about 2 hours - and it
didn't phase them at all! I would've been grousing and grumbling at
least a little bit.

Sura das and his wife Varaha Rupa devi dasi were Indians from Bombay
who live and work at the Hare Krishna temple in Juhu. They were very
friendly and communicative, and I basically ended up telling them
most of my life story on the 1 hour drive back to the temple. I had
been to college earlier in the day, and was wearing a shirt by the
industrial rock group KMFDM which showed a guy holding a gun to his
head, and it had the letters KMFDM across the top in bold, and a smaller
phrase "Don't blow your top" underneath the picture. It took a little
while to explain what the shirt was.

So, in any case, I now had friends at the New York temple. After the
Gita lecture and the arati, we all went downstairs for prasadam. I
was talking to Sura das and his wife and telling them about this summer
job and how I ended up here. They were about to head back to India,
because I think Sura das was one of the head planners of the Janmastami
festival, which attracts some HUGE number of people.

I was telling him about all of my troubles trying to get sattvic food
and about how I was so glad to find the temple. I was telling him about
where I was staying, and explained some of my fellow dorm-mates. We were 
laughing and joking, and I guess I was speaking a little loud. I got
tapped on the shoulder, and a Gujarati lady introduced herself to me.
We spoke for a little while, and she told me that she had overheard
me talking to Sura das about what a hassle it was finding vegetarian
food. She told me that she and her family live in Queens, and she
immediately extended an open invitation to come over for dinner every
night. I thanked her profusely and told her I would definitely take
her up on it.

In a few minutes, her husband came over, and she introduced me to him.
She told him that I was a student working here for the summer, and was
staying up in Pleasantville. He immediately asked her if she had told
me to come for dinner. He also made sure that he extended and invitation
to me. We spoke a for a little while more, and I found out that he and
his wife had come to the states in the 1960's. He was an engineer, and
both he and his wife had been coming to the temple since the early 70's,
or perhaps it was the late 60's - I can't remember which. In any case,
they had been with the temple a long time.

Sura das then introduced me to a few other people at the temple, and
while he was doing so, another person came up to me. His name was
Bhakta Chris, and he was an American devotee. He told me that he had
overheard me talking about Pleasantville, and he was situated not too
far from me. He lived in Yonkers, which was about 25 miles away from
the temple, and about 15 miles away from where I was. He offered to
come pick me up when on Sundays when he goes to the temple, but I
couldn't let him do that, since he'd be going in the wrong direction.
He didn't mind, he said, because it was nice to have fellow devotees
living so far away from the temple. It turns out that he was in the
restaurant business, and was in the process of opening a Chinese
vegetarian restaurant with a group of Buddhists.

So overall, it was a pretty good first trip to the temple. Not only
had I been able to "put down roots" in my newly adopted (if only temporary)
city, but I'd also gotten a dinner invitation and a carpool offer to boot!

I stayed at the temple talking to the devotees a little longer than I
should have, because by the time I was leaving, there was nobody else
around me. I needed to find the subway station, and it was getting dark.
I walked around outside, and I was a bit scared. I was alone, and the
streets weren't very crowded. The people on the streets were mostly
very large guys, and they were drinking and playing very loud music.
Many of them were very muscular, and too many of them had beepers -
there was no way these guys were all doctors.

I was looking at a very tiny map without much detail, and I couldn't
figure out why I wasn't able to find the subway entrance. I knew the
more I looked at the map, the more it would be obvious that I wasn't
from around here. I was starting to panic.

All of the sudden, I looked up, and I saw a white guy walking with
two girls - that in itself was pretty unusual in this neighborhood. 
The guy was pretty large and fairly muscular, but the first thing 
I noticed about him was that he was wearing tulasi beads
around his neck. I had found devotees! I stopped him and asked him
for directions to the subway. It turned out that I was only about
50 feet away from it, but a newstand was blocking my view. I thanked
him and sped off, because I knew the train would be coming soon.

I entered the subway to the usual stench of cheap alcohol and urine.
There were quite a few drunks begging for money or just walking
around in a stupor. There was one guy who didn't quite fit in (besides
me), because he was a youngish white guy with a cherubic face. I looked
at his shirt, and realized that I'd seen him at the temple during the
arati. He was wearing a shirt for a straightedge music group called
Shelter. Straightedge music is an offshoot of punk, but with a different
ethic. It advocates abstinence before marriage, vegetarianism, and
abstinence from drugs and alcohol - in short, rebelling against the
values of the Flower Generation. Shelter is a straightedge group that
is also Krishna-conscious - their albums have songs about Krishna, and
the guitarist of the group is now an initiated devotee, Vraja Kishor das.

We spoke for a little while, and it turned out that this guy's name
was also Chris. He was an independent record producer, and he lived
in Connecticut. His parents weren't too pleased with his desire to
hang out with the Hare Krishnas, so he had to tell them that he was
out drinking and partying with friends whenever he wanted to go to
the temple. Pretty funny, I thought.

My train soon came, and I was back off to Manhattan to collect my stuff
from Jay's apartment before I headed back to Pleasantville. It had been
quite a weekend.

[to be continued]
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