"What can I tell you about New York that you don't already know?", asks a poet, the exiled lover of a city not as new. Everything has been lived here before. Everything has happened many times before.

I see this now: the meetings and partings, arrivals and departures, laughter, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and throats unfurling chants, invocations, suicide love letters. If New York has to be sung into ghazal, what script is sufficient? What refrain should its couplets employ? What raga?

What tounge leaning against ours will be soft enough to touch the solitude that lives in the gaps between these avenues, and these players playing in the avenues? What maps of grammar will be able to replace the knowing of memory with obliviousness of forgetting, in this new city where everyone appears as if we have met them before?