Philadelphia

Philadelphia is a city where the dwellers seem gripped by a recurring sense of having lived the exact moment before. The same conversation, the same person with a smirk on his face, the same weather — precisely when your neighbor locked his apartment to leave and the mayor was having a nightmare about his house being bugged by the FBI. Or you might hear the jumbled voices on the radio discussing Dalí and the death of a jazz singer in your car while a Black man walked across the street with a beer bottle in hand.

It’s a city that has been aging ever since Ben Franklin dreamed that, on the day of his funeral, leaders — thirty-four ministers, preachers, priests, and at least one rabbi — marched arm in arm behind his casket as it was carried to the gravesite. He even dreamed of the Liberty Bell crumbling.

If you sit in one of the chairs in the old assembly hall of the Constitution House, after climbing the sturdy wooden stairs, you could still sense the rustle of tunics and sombreros worn by your fellow legislators. Perhaps you could still argue with them to make Gujarat the fifty-first federal state.

If you walk through Center City along the sun-soaked brick buildings, you might meet travelers from neighboring towns afflicted by bouts of insomnia, lost in the constitutional walking tour of Philadelphia. And if you drift down toward the inner city along the Delaware River, you might find Lila, the aging and desperate wharf-bar pickup, and hone your ruminations on life and civilization into something understandable and real before you sail back out to the outer seas again.

Further north, you might find Mr. George Tharakan stepping out of his Mercedes-Benz in a suit, entering his four-bedroom house, then later emerging in a lungi to inspect the fence he shares with his fellow native. If you glanced through his family album, you would find him wearing the exact same lungi, inspecting his fence on a similar sunny evening in Thiruvalla, Kerala.