The 6 train at 7AM is its own little universe. Half the car is asleep standing up. The other half is pretending the AC is working when it is absolutely not.
I got on at 68th Street, already sweating through a linen shirt I'd ironed at 6:30 like a fool.
And then this man got on at 86th holding a white bucket. Inside it, marigolds. A wall of orange. The 6 train at 7AM does not usually smell like anything good, but it smelled like a temple courtyard for exactly four stops.
He told me, when I couldn't stop staring, that he was taking them up to a temple near Parkchester. Said his daughter does the threading. He'd been doing this run on the 6 for eleven years.
My nani used to string marigolds for Navratri. I'd sit on the floor and "help," which mostly meant tangling the thread and getting yelled at lovingly.
In Ahmedabad you don't think about marigolds. They're just there, draped over doorways, crushed under scooter tires, sold at every corner. Here a single bucket of them on the 6 train at 7AM felt like a message I was supposed to receive.
I didn't cry. I want that on record. But my throat did a thing.
He got off at 125th to transfer. Said "beta, eat something, you look thin" — the universal aunty-uncle blessing — and was gone into the crowd.
The car went back to smelling like a car. The man next to me put his AirPod back in. Summer in New York resumed its regular programming.
But I rode the rest of the way to work holding a little orange in my chest.
Some mornings the city hands you home on a subway pole. You just have to look up.
Love,