A JOURNEY IN QUEENS.

A JOURNEY IN QUEENS. This is my favorite magazine story of the year. I say “story” because it has elements of a folk tale. The story is beautifully told by Michael Idov. It’s a classic story of a 53 hour journey by a lady from Nepal through an alien landscape in New York City.As with many stories of journeys, the New York magazine article has a good map showing the heroine’s journey and the locations of her adventures. Krishna was visiting her daughter, who had lived in the United States for twelve years. Krishna went for a jog by herself and took a wrong turn. She been born in a city of 200,000 people, but New York is different. She knew a second language, but it was Hindi. She knew only three words of English. She had left at home the money and the cellphone that her daughter had given her. Her experience reminded me of what it would be like to be lost in a forest. She had used the elevated track of the Number 7 train as a landmark on other occasions, but after she lost her bearings, elevated tracks were a snare because she didn’t know there was more than one elevated track in Queens. She wandered through Queens and reached Brooklyn and even Roosevelt Island in an attempt to get to the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The clash of cultures in the story is dramatic. Although Krishna had taken up jogging, her family consulted three different astrologers in their efforts to find her.