Richmond Hill is one of the few desi neighborhoods in New York I haven’t spent much time in. Jackson Heights is where one of my libraries is and the place to take people who want to see the novelty of an urban South Asian neighborhood. Curry Hill is five minutes away from my office - I pass it almost every day. I guess I haven’t spent much time in Kensington either - maybe that’s the next place I waste a weekend night when I have nothing else to do. (Of course, Jersey’s often where the real action is at, but as much as it pains me to say it as a native, it doesn’t count for this exercise.) Still, Richmond Hill is a place of some importance. Our first New York state politician came out of here. The largest and first gurdwara on the East Coast is in the neighborhood, and though my dabbling with religion has passed, I wanted to visit at some point to pay tribute to my not-Sikh, half-Punjabi heritage. Anyway, like with most Friday nights, I didn’t have much going on so I figured it was as good a time as ever to make the trek to deepest Queens.
After finishing another wfh Friday, I got on the LIRR, ready to go to Jamaica and catch a bus to the gurdwara. Once I quickly popped in and out, maybe I’d grab some food from Guyanese section and I’d hightail my way back to the city. I got on the train a few minutes early and as I leaned back into my seat, ready to read my book for the 15-minute ride, I realized I had an issue. I was wearing shorts. If I learned anything from years of religious education, it was that you don’t wear shorts to a holy place. I tried sprinting off the idle train, but the doors were closed. After a consultation with /r/sikhism, and remembering I am a non-confrontational coward, I decided I would not be disrespecting Sikhi and the gurdwara would not happen. Regardless, one train and crowded bus ride later, I found myself in Queens’s Little Punjab.
I walked around a bit and took in the surroundings. 101st Street didn’t have the vibrancy of Jackson Heights or Journal Square - not shocking for a residential neighborhood at 7 p.m. on a Friday - but people were still milling about. The stores were the Punjabi version of your normal desi stores. The immigration lawyers, the cheap sweet shops, the two-doctor medical offices, the barebones restaurants, the flyers for events out in the suburbs with too much text and too-big photos. There were some genuine curiosities though. The ads on the glass of storefront mandirs promoting yatras to apparently important places of spirituality in the rest of North America.
$200 to go to West Virginia to see the Palace of Gold.
$250 to go to Toronto to experience the divine.
The flyers for astrologers that filled Jackson Heights were here too. There might’ve been even more here than there. Normally, I laugh off their promises of solving life problems, but something came upon me and I found myself getting my palm read for $10 by some self-proclaimed grandson of a pandit sitting on a metal table outside a juice store.
I didn’t quite get his prophecy.
He told me that I give good advice, but people shittalk me behind my back. My family, my friends, my nonexistent partner. For the sake of my sanity, I’m not going to believe him.
He told me I’d make it to 82. I appreciate that. It's a solid age – just as old as our dear president. He told me my mom raised me right and that my dad is a legend. My dad was happy when I told him that, but he also thinks astrology is crap. Like father, like son in this instance. The palm reader told me there was darkness that I had picked up on some road. Not in Queens, of course - and certainly not in Little Punjab - but somewhere else. He offered to exorcize me of this darkness, but I politely declined. I like to think my neuroticism feeds me. Not a bad way to spend $10 all in all.
Even if I was too cowardly to go in, I made my way to the gurdwara afterwards. I had to see it. This was the purpose of the endeavor. The only other American gurdwara I've been to was in San Jose. That had a scenic overlook of the Santa Clara Valley. This was smaller, two blocks down from a Caribbean nightclub and a conspicuously high number of barbershops. It’s a nice building though – very Indian with a golden dome on top and a bunch of turbaned men around it. It was one of those converted office buildings that temples in the suburbs often are. (This was the second gurdwara at this site. The first one was a converted Baptist church which had burned down.) The yellow-and-blue flags of Khalistan and remembrances for 1984 draped its entrance. There's something to be said about that, but by a different writer in a different essay. not wanting to test my luck with the shorts, and trailing a young group of Punjabi girls debating the merits of luxury cars, I made my way to Liberty Avenue and the Guyenese section.
I came to the Guyanese section just wanting a quick bite before I rode back home, but instead I quickly found myself spending my Friday night in a Guyanese bar playing old Bollywood standards. (I think it’s Guyanese at least – there’s a flag at this place, and it is a Guyanese neighborhood, but the walls are decorated with the type of stock photos that you see in a Manhattan hotel room.)
I’m here because I saw cricket on the TV, and I was drawn in by the novelty of watching the sport with people who aren’t from South Asia. A group of West Indies fans are cheering every wicket their boys take against America; much like those straight from the subcontinent, they don’t seem interested in passing an American Tebbit test. power to them, I guess. An electrician in front of me goes through a pile of scratch-off cards and sitting next to him is the one woman here who isn’t an employee. She isn’t talking to anyone. Other tables of guys chat while drinking buckets of domestic beer - I can’t tell what they’re saying because the Hindi music drowns out everything. One dude is wearing a Washington Wizards shirt for some reason. Meanwhile I sit alone in a corner below the TV with the security footage, drinking a $4 bud light, watching America lose to our Caribbean brethren. The place is a vibe. I wait out the US's innings, see if we can pull off a strong last few overs and make the West Indies fans quiet. but it’s a double loss for me. The US only gets to 128, but they hold off long enough that I just miss the A train and have to wait 20 minutes to get out of Queens.
