After he leaves, I linger beneath the building’s only recognisable façade, the overhang with the gold trim. I’ve an urge to look up the word façade so I take out my phone. My father would have approved. What I am learning: Ade, a suffix denoting an action or a person or persons acting … blockade; escapade; masquerade.

I walk to Vanderbilt and now a man is standing beside what might have been the entrance, under a no-smoking sign, smoking. I tell him I like where he’s standing. He laughs. I ask if he’s the guard. He laughs again. ‘Would I be dressed like this?’ I consider the grey three-piece suit, checkered grey-green shirt, olive tie, tan dress shoes. My father would have approved. He says he’s a tailor at a nearby shop. On his way to and from work he gets to walk through the hotel lobby and now he’s done for the day.

‘Is the chandelier still there?’

‘It’s all there. Exactly the same. Beautiful.’

‘How can I get inside?’

‘You can’t.’

I stayed there with my father in 1987, after my first semester at college. What I was learning: it was the first hotel in the city to offer a television set in every room. Our suite also had a VCR and tapes. On an art deco coffee table with brass inserts lay a large bowl of mixed nuts. For dinner we ordered room service: jumbo shrimp, white rice, boiled carrots. He gave me twenty dollars for lunches for the month. Twice, I walked around the block, but it was cold and it bothered me that I couldn’t tell the difference between real and plastic Christmas trees, even when I touched them. So I stuck with nuts.

The third week, my grades came in. Straight A’s. I watched 9½ Weeks on the chaise lounge. I wanted a hat. I wanted a white shirt with stiff collars. I took the twenty dollars and my own savings and walked to a salon. The stylist trussed up my hair and began scissoring out French layers. When I told her my father’s company had recently bought the hotel, she was impressed.

‘What company?’

‘An airline.’

‘Where are you all from?’

‘Pakistan.’

She was taking off too much but she was friendly. The hotel was in Wall Street, she said, a movie playing down the street, and had a secret passage leading to Grand Central Terminal.

Then she was done. ‘What do you think?’

My face was small inside the big blow-dry and I’d have no savings left but I said thank you.

I re-entered the hotel through the swivelling gold doors and sat in a seat in the shadows in the lobby. People came and went. There was a distinct sound of heels sliding from floor to carpet. I timed their movements to the ring of the elevator bell. I looked up at the two-storey ceiling. The chandelier had too many tiers to count and its placement gave the impression of a continuous pattern of tiering: beneath it lay a plant (real) on a white marble tabletop on a white marble floor with a black seven-point star inside a black circle around which a scattering of small black squares drew the eye toward two immense burgundy carpets, each running up a flight of seven steps, to a ballroom with another chandelier.

It was my second residence in America.

That evening, we watched Fantastic Voyage. We were glad it had Raquel Welch. My father was in high spirits for other reasons, too. What I was learning: the airline had become the first in Asia to run the Boeing 737-300. It had just acquired its first Airbus A300B4-200. The numbers were better known to me than a home address. Next month, he’d head for Malé, capital of the Maldives, to launch a new service. He experienced a rush of emotion before travelling to a new place.

I’d left the old English dictionary he’d given me at college. When I sat beside him with a pocket red Webster, he said, ‘first class’. The bowl of nuts had been replenished. From the back of the video tape box, we learned that the film was made two years after the airline became the only non-Soviet one to fly between Europe and Moscow, and the same year it began offering routes to Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Jeddah, and Baghdad. My father had been present for each inauguration. He didn’t have to speak of these concurrences. I knew how to link our worlds.

In the film, people and machines could be miniaturised. They could travel the human body to save an American scientist who lay comatose with a blood clot in his brain because he’d been shot for uncovering a Cold War secret. That shrunken submarine named Proteus with a miniaturised crew inside – it looked to me like a cockpit. I was the pilot, pioneering new routes!

After a time, my father chin-nudged the dictionary. ‘Look up Proteus.’

‘He was a Greek god.’

‘Look it up.’

I did. ‘He was a sea god who could change shape, personality, and even principles.’

‘Acha!’ His eyes lit up. ‘Yes, one must be adaptable. But never compromise integrity.’

Next, he asked, ‘What is the reason they have to get to his brain through the heart? They would have better luck taking another route.’

‘A fistula.’ My nose was already in the book’s pages. ‘A passage between an artery and a vein. They have to take that detour.’

‘But it makes no sense. Look! All the turbulence is in the heart.’

I looked.

‘Proteus should take them a different way.’ He chuckled, enjoying fistfuls of cashews. ‘They have sixty minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much time has passed?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then I remembered. ‘There’s a secret passage between the hotel and Grand Central.’

‘Acha?’

On screen, a nurse knocked a surgical tool onto the floor. The crash sent Raquel Welch, who was in the comatose man’s inner ear, cartwheeling to his cilia, where antibodies identified her as a virus. She was coated in Y-shaped avenging angels before being rescued by the men.

We uttered a simultaneous ‘Uff!’ followed by a simultaneous laugh.

‘How much time do they have left?’ His voice rose in excitement.

‘I don’t know!’

‘You should know.’

The villain on the team tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the mission. The rest escaped through a tear duct. I rewound the tape to my favourite part: the crew floating inside a body of spectacular luminescence. Despite having little time left – no, because of it – the miniaturised humans gawked, while around them swam jelly fish blood cells of abundant colour, pulsing and shape-shifting in soundless music. I loved that this sequence was slowed.

‘The mind can go anywhere,’ said my father. ‘We each have our own fantastic.’

A childhood friend visited him later that evening. They drank whiskey and shared stories I’d never heard before. My father moved effortlessly between languages yet in his mother tongue, Punjabi, all his muscles worked without reluctance or strain, as though he danced the tongue.

What I was learning: they grew up near the railway line. My father would chase the trains and run down the tunnel beneath the tracks to escape his parents. ‘They were always dinning in my ears that saying, “If you have to fool around, do so away from your neighbourhood.”’ His friend laughed. ‘Past the tracks were the shops that sold milk and mutton. We could afford just a small quantity.’

‘But you watched closely,’ said his friend. ‘You were always a great observer.’

My father grinned the grin that helped him knock down barriers. With my mother, he did it with flowers. His face was marmoreal. No blemishes, not one. People said I looked like him, though I had scar-prone skin.

More friends arrived. They discussed the airline’s profits, the war in Afghanistan, the General at home. What I was learning: there was no timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. It meant no peace in Pakistan either. But this I already knew. The battle had long ago crossed the border and when it shut down Karachi’s streets, my parents had grown afraid. The war was the reason they’d allowed me to leave them for this country.

‘How it freezes people on all sides, this Iron Curtain,’ my father was saying. ‘One day the whole world will look the way it does because of today.’

A group nod wrapped them all in sadness. Then the conversation shifted to their children, whose successes were listed not unlike those of the national carrier. So-and-so’s child was at Harvard, so-and-so’s had stood first. I was at a no-name college but on a scholarship, making me ‘the first woman in the family’ to receive one.

What I was learning: be a silent bullet point or grab a book and say, ‘Excuse me.’

I hadn’t drawn the curtains so my bedroom was awash with streetlights when I stepped inside. At the window, I saw women in short skirts. One wore a knee-length brown coat. She clasped the collars but kept the coat unbuttoned. It poorly resembled real fur and closely resembled my mother’s, who’d bought hers at a car boot sale when my father was posted in London. Our furniture, too, was used; she had a nose for sniffing out deals. When asked where she bought our clothes and furnishings, she wouldn’t say. The hair of the woman outside was set in a style from the previous decade, like my mother’s.

I lay on the bed, book unopened.

In January, I’d return to weeknights in the college kitchen. The joke was that Third World students were baptised in First World waters through scrubbing one hundred per cent durable extra-large stainless-steel pots. I served inedible meats and greens alongside those who knew me as ‘the one from the Stan-country fighting communism’, assumed I was a doctor’s daughter, and quizzed me on why, like them, I tolerated a boss who rated us according to a knowledge of salad dressing. (When asked where I dipped my carrots, I whispered, ‘Daal’.) I kept my (pre-haircut) savings in the sandalwood box where my mother had kept hers. It had come with a note, ‘I love you. Make us proud.’

The gaps in how we appeared and lived weren’t unknown to me. They made us a family. But only I knew of the hunts around soda machines for coins and the French teacher who laughed about ‘Pakis’ sneaking across every border as though not with suitcases but in them while writing me a cheque for one-third the minimum wage for babysitting her children as I was too embarrassed to say that I had no bank account. This, they wouldn’t want to know. Not in any language.

So where was in and who was with?

My fingers traced the dictionary’s pages. What I was learning: The Iron Curtain once referred to the shutters in theatre houses that kept fires from spreading.

I wanted to tell someone about the cute alum with long hair who ran the Adventure Program and knew about canoes. He frequented my dorm in the Fall. I always sent him away. After the last time I watched him leave, I drew on my wall with a piece of chalk. It was a habit developed years before, in Karachi, when I’d been grounded for struggling at school and had to repeat a year. On Day One of the grounding, my father had handed me a used old English dictionary that smelled of car tyres and said, ‘Look it up.’ Other instructions: for three blistering summer months, leave only for bathroom breaks and meals, and never bring shame again. The room in Karachi had a dark blue wall. When I drew cockpits, always cockpits, the chalk was bright. The room at college had white walls. The chalk was a ghostly impression, easily erased.

I watched women in short skirts under streetlights and saw the girl in Karachi, the woman in America, the daughter in the hotel. What we were learning:

• To struggle was to fool around. This was only permissible away from the neighbourhood.
• The mind can go anywhere. A cockpit was a big cell streaming through the cosmos and I was the pilot, unhemmed and grand, gaping at all the little people outside.

The day before I left for college and my father for Malé, he said to meet him by the hotel entrance at noon. When I arrived, he was grinning. Beside him was a white concierge introduced as Mr Fielding and a brown bellhop who was George.

‘Let’s find this secret passage,’ said my father.

So he remembered. I laughed. We followed the two men.

My father wore a grey suit, white shirt, and tie of maroon and white diagonal stripes. His black shoes glistened. He never travelled without a canister of Cherry Blossom boot polish, horsehair brush, and yellow cloth. It was a daily ritual; I’d seen him shine the shoes this morning, as always, after his morning tea. The socks had been laid out ahead. While wearing them, his feet had lifted easefully. He and my mother both slipped into their socks with grace, while my feet unravelled threads. His arms had polished the shoes in similarly fluid strokes. He had long limbs and though his dreams were fierce, his movements were light, almost weightless.

We were heading down a flight of stairs that led to a marble hallway below the lobby. Yet, I could hear no elevator bells, nor the chatter of those above us. I heard only four sets of footsteps and three men’s voices and my own thrill at being secreted here. I was in with.

According to George, the shops we passed had closed a while ago. He was easy to talk to, so I said that for an abandoned basement it was surprisingly airy. ‘Not for long,’ he replied. My father was nodding and saying little except, occasionally, ‘First class’. He sometimes opened spaces in public, sometimes closed them in private.

Mr Fielding had grown quiet. It occurred to me that my father was his boss. George, who now guided us to an area closed off with yellow tape, seemed to know it too. From a pocket of his beige trousers, he pulled out a torch. ‘Look there,’ he said, and at first the light shone on a line of gold buttons on his red vest. Laughing, he turned the torch around. We leaned forward to see an unfinished area with a door. When George crouched below the tape, Mr. Fielding said, ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ but my father and I followed George.

The door led down a flight of steps, each marked in yellow paint. We turned left, into the tunnel. It was ink black and the air was rank as an old book. ‘It’ll take you to the terminal,’ said George. ‘There’s a gate and you won’t be able to get in but I can get you up to that gate if you want.’

‘We should head back,’ said Mr Fielding.

Now my father hesitated. He suddenly switched from English to Urdu, my mother tongue, to ask what I wanted. Also in Urdu, I told him I wanted to go on.

In the light of the torch, I saw my father gesture toward the dark.

Twice, he went ‘Oopsh!’ and laughed, embarrassed, when the ground was especially uneven. George swung the beam in wider circles. There were sounds of scurrying. My father had an extreme phobia of rodents, so I was impressed that he didn’t turn us back. His hand was on my shoulder and wasn’t heavy. ‘It’s like that movie,’ he whispered, in English again.

‘Which movie?’ George whispered back.

‘The one where they go into the man’s body.’

‘Which one’s that?’ asked George.

‘Fantastic Voyage,’ I said.

‘Righteous,’ said George.

I hit something soft with my foot. My father did too. He stopped. His hand bounced off of my shoulder. I reached for the hand – it was always cool, always clean – and walked faster. But after a few beats, he again muttered, ‘Oopsh!’ Again he stopped, now tap-tapping the ground with the toes of his shoes, willing that thing creeping up his leg to leave. ‘It really is very dark.’

‘How much longer?’ said Mr Fielding.

‘Almost there,’ answered George.

In the movie they were in a submarine and tomorrow my father would be on a plane and the captain would invite him into the cockpit and I would be on a bus and now we were underground.

‘Remember this,’ he said to me.

‘I will. I’ll look it up.’

The tunnel filled with his laughter.

We reached the gate. There wasn’t much to see but we were there so we looked through it. Then we went up to the street. Mr Fielding left and the rest of us headed for Grand Central, to look through the other side. There were many routes, said George, and most were blockaded, not only with tape but walls. ‘This will be gone soon.’

It was after two pm when we returned to the hotel. As he shook George’s hand, my father slipped him a twenty-dollar bill. Then we walked to the dining area and ordered jumbo shrimp.

In Malé, my father developed a flu-like infection that continued after his return to Karachi. Eventually, he was diagnosed with leukopenia. His white blood cell count had dropped and the neutrophils, vital for fighting pathogens, diminished to below 600 per one litre of blood. It was a condition, not an illness, one he’d likely carried for a time. It caused lingering infections, weight loss, and severe intestinal disorders for the remaining years of his life. The only way we could discuss the neutrophil count was by tagging it to aircraft names, as suffixes: Boeing 777-600 or 500? After it sank to 747-400, I wasn’t able to play.

Doctors said to rest. They said he pushed himself too hard. It would defeat his immune system.

He had to fly.

I’m grateful that he didn’t see the airplanes being grounded when the health of the airline began to decline.

On the day of his death anniversary, I return to the boarded-up hotel. The temperature’s in the forties; no longer too cold for me. There’s roadwork on Vanderbilt. I step around it. I find no tailor smoking beneath the no-smoking sign but notice another sign that must have been behind him: ‘Ring the doorbell ONLY for deliveries.’ There’s a plastic button beginning to crack. I still can’t decide if the swivelling door was here.

A ladder is dropped into a manhole and a man with a safety jacket that says ‘Hot Black & Sticky’ is going down it. I watch his descent. I turn my head to the building wrapped in sadness. That physical ache in my eyes from a week ago returns. I cross the street for a different view.

I miss him, the only person who’d understand why it’s so hard.

I’ve seen abandoned houses with plywood nailed to the siding unlovingly and the windows that shatter left behind. I’ve wondered what would be better: Demolish those houses? Never know they were there? On some structures, the boards are torn off, maybe by someone in need of fuel, maybe no reason at all. Then there are those that make any configuration of touch impossible: like the hotel. There is nothing to hold, not even broken glass. The boards are bolted on too tight to pry off. They are given a coating of paint that couldn’t be called any colour. It has no texture or shine. Even mourners dress in light.

When I look higher up: perfect visibility.

Earlier in the year, on a day as clear as this, I saw hot air balloons launched in Central Park. I counted twenty-one colourful panels as they twirled and it was better than counting the tiers of a chandelier. To float now in a wicker basket on a slow and silent voyage close to sundown in a sky of spectacular luminescence is what I want. More than to watch the movie.

I take out my phone to check if rides are offered year-round but don’t look it up, not yet.

I walk three blocks, then decide it has to be my favourite store. I walk from Midtown to Lower Manhattan. The sun is bronzing the windows of apartment buildings. A bicycle speeds by. Two lovers almost shove me off the sidewalk in that way couples have, with one fist Near a scorched brick wall, someone is pausing without picking up the dog’s droppings.

In sweeping movements similar to my father’s, I welcome him to the neighbourhood: juice bar, bakery, vintage shops, and the new restaurant with the rooftop garden where I work and that I co-own. He stayed with one company, always loyal. I quit several jobs in retail and even a two-star hotel before accepting that I’m happiest around things I can touch. As an entremetier, my task is not only preparing vegetables, but growing them. I’m devoted to that garden. The co-owner is a woman from a corridor of the former Iron Curtain that is now a Green Belt.

What I am learning: border zones and the isolation they create can be an opening. Some will enter through knocking down the barriers. Others, knocking on. Or tap-tapping a toe underground in the dark. I’m unsure when or if I was ever in, ever with. But some days, up on that rooftop, my tongue can unwind. My foot can find its way through loops of tangled thread.

The store is at the corner, abutting the restaurant. I take my time. Even in winter, flowers are abundant. I find purple sweet peas, pink and white camellias, yellow and purple hellebores. There’s a tub of witch hazel from the seller’s own terrace – the ribbons of yellow petals carry a citrus-cinnamon scent straight up my nose – and another of winter jasmine.

It’s almost three o’clock when I start heading back. I know my small and silly act will likely draw abuse, if anyone even answers. This would have stopped me in the past.

I ring the bell of the shuttered hotel. For a while, nothing. Then I hear scurrying. ‘Who is it?’

‘Delivery.’

There is more scurrying and now the sound of keys. I look for a keyhole but don’t see it.

‘Step back. It pivots.’

I appreciate being told. As the door swings out, I look at the floor. White, glossy. The man standing there is brown, in a black shirt and trousers. When he sees the flowers, he looks at my other hand, then behind me and back again, confused.

‘Yes?’ Before I can answer, he adds, in an accent that I cannot place, ‘You can’t come inside.’

‘I’ve already been inside. These are for you.’