A short walk to the consulate

After the apartment on 108th Street I went to another place and, a few months later, I moved to an apartment on West 76th Street. It was near the American Museum of Natural History. From there it was only a short walk across Central Park to the Consulate. While going to work in the morning, I used to walk fast, jog or run. It used to take me only five minutes. It was in this apartment that I wrote many poems.

My landlady was German. She used to tell me, “You will not like America. I can see that your lifestyle is very simple. You are not modern. Here, everybody is modern.”

One day I was about to go to the Museum of Natural History to look at the exhibits. Five minutes before I arrived, a man was shot and killed. I heard the sound even!

Bholanath: One morning I got a telephone call from Guru to come and help him move. At that time I had a job delivering carpets, so I drove my truck to his place. He did not have many things — just a mattress, a few boxes of books and some bricks and pieces of wood that he used to make a bookcase. I had some rope in the truck, so I tied it around each box and lowered them out the window. Guru waited on the street below to untie the boxes and put them in the truck. He thought this was very ingenious.