The J train at 7AM is the closest thing New York has to a temple. Nobody talks. Everybody is half-asleep. The sun comes up over the Williamsburg Bridge and for about ninety seconds the whole car turns gold, and every tired face looks like a painting.
I catch it at Kosciuszko Street. There is a man who plays flute two mornings a week, badly, and I love him for it.
Before the platform, though, there is Sammy's bodega. And Sammy's bodega has a cat named Laddu. I did not name him. Somebody before me did, and honestly whoever it was deserves a medal, because this orange menace does look like a laddu that gained sentience.
My 7AM J train commute always starts with Laddu. He sits on the ATM like a tiny landlord. I buy my chai — Sammy makes it too sweet, exactly the way my Mummy would disapprove of — and Laddu accepts one chin scratch as rent.
The thing about a 7AM commute is that it forces a kind of stillness on you. The Marcy Avenue stop, elevated over Broadway, gives you rooftops and water towers and the bridge in one frame. I used to scroll through it. Now I just look.
Growing up in Ahmedabad, mornings were loud. Pressure cooker whistles, the milk guy, Papa's news on full volume. Here my mornings are quiet in a way that took me two years to stop finding lonely.
Somewhere around Essex Street the train fills up. Suits, students, a woman with an enormous bouquet, the day arriving all at once. I get off at Canal and walk the rest.
But for those twenty minutes on the J, before the emails and the samples and the fittings, I get to be nobody in particular. Just a girl with a too-sweet chai watching her city wake up.
Tell me about the small ritual that keeps you human. I collect these like buttons.
Love,