There is a specific kind of heat that only exists on the 6 train platform at 8AM in August. It is not weather. It is a punishment.
I stood at 68th Street this morning watching the express blow past, and I swear the tunnel exhaled on me like a tandoor.
Here is what nobody tells you about the 6 train in August. Every car is a lottery. You get on, you pray, and either the AC works or you have entered a slow cooker with poles.
Today I got the slow cooker. A man's forearm and my forehead became intimately acquainted somewhere around 51st Street. We did not speak. We simply endured.
Then a woman near the door pulled out one of those little handheld fans, the kind that light up rainbow, and she angled it slightly toward me and a kid in a Yankees cap. She didn't have to. She just did.
That is the thing about the 6 train in August. Everyone is suffering equally, so nobody is really suffering alone. It's the closest New York gets to community, all of us marinating in the same misery, silently agreeing not to make it worse.
Back home in Ahmedabad the heat was worse, honestly, forty-four degrees and the air like a wet blanket. But we had verandas and neem trees and my Nani handing me cold cucumber like it was medicine. Here the heat has nowhere to go. It just pools underground and waits for us.
I got out at Astor Place and the street air felt like AC by comparison, which tells you everything.
I bought a mango lassi from the Punjabi spot near St. Marks purely out of spite for the weather. Small rebellion. Big satisfaction.
By September I'll forget all of this. I'll romanticize the 6 train. I always do.
But for now, if you're on that platform too, I see you. Point your little rainbow fan at a stranger. It counts.
Love,