I’m a Kolkata girl, which means two things. One, I have an opinion about everything from the price of onions to the proper taal of a Rabindrasangeet. Two, I believe the world can be reorganised over a plate of alu dum and a very long adda.
I live in New York. I’m a child-rights anti-trafficking activist, founder of Apne Aap, a professor at NYU, and a writer of YA books. Rising costs worry me. ICE raids on the most vulnerable worry me. The growing number of homeless children and families worries me most. So when Zohran and I sat down to dinner in 2019 to talk about his run, I leaned in.
He offered a democratic socialist path that matched my upbringing and my instincts. He spoke of small donors and fighting fascism. I spoke of Gandhi and how he joined existing grassroots movements and united them against British rule.
Since then, I’ve backed his bids, knocked doors, and watched him rise from assemblyman to mayor of New York City. When the mayor’s race began, I slung a jhola over my shoulder, slipped on my chappals, and went to Jamaica via Jackson Heights.
Someone in the operation understood the most Bengali of political strategies: take the fight to the para. In Kolkata, the para is a neighbourhood universe, where your fishmonger knows your exam results and your tutor knows your allergies and the tea stall is a think tank.
In New York, the para lived in cafés, mishti shops, halal butchers, sari stores, walkups, clapboard houses, street vendors, and park benches.
If you convince the shopkeeper, you convince the street. The campaign went there. Shops became civic help desks. Shopkeepers offered windows and WhatsApp lists that money cannot buy. Taxi drivers, many Bangladeshi, remembered the medallion-debt fast and brought friends to the line.
Delivery boys threaded flyers through buildings between shifts, carrying the faint fragrance of coconut oil and purpose. Uncles fetched chairs. In Queens the kebab joints became the broadcast studio. A face in the window. A Bangla flyer by the till. An early-vote reminder tucked in with the dhania. Opinions turned into turnout.
I watched the campaign treat the city not as a stage but as a set of rooms. The bodega was the bulletin board. The café was the committee room. The sari shop was a civic desk. It felt, to my Bengali-at-adda bones, exactly right.
The aunties ran the secretariat. Bangla and English, with a dash of Spanish when needed. Ten words, no waffle. “Beta, vote. Rent predictable. Bus faster. Good.” They shared early-vote timings. They pointed to the right desk for forms. They came back the next evening to check progress, and again the week after.
And food mattered. Boxes of samosas, kebabs, and pakoras kept canvassers cheerful and useful. A paper cone of jhalmuri often did what 10 policy memos could not. Volunteers stayed upright on cha, momos, and conviction, with biryani arriving like reinforcements.
Teens designed flyers between exams. Students set type at 1am because printers grow philosophical at sunrise. A pishi fixed a hijab pin and a moral wobble in the same minute. And a familiar chant gathered its own tapri rhythm: “Amar Mayor, Tomar Mayor — Mamdani, Mamdani.” It echoed an older Kolkata cry I grew up with—“Amar Naam, Tomar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam.”
Zohran showed up as himself — African, Indian, Muslim, New Yorker. Sometimes in kurta and chappals. Sometimes in a slim suit. Often in patterned African shirts. Never sloppy, always respectful. He ate biryani with his fingers the way any Kolkata cousin would, then said the one sentence that matters to everyone: if housing is affordable and buses are faster, you get your life back. Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Christians, everyone breathes easier when rent does not lurch 40 per cent. That is not a vibe. That is arithmetic.
Author Ruchira Gupta at a Bangladeshi Hindu temple in Queens, New York
Because I live here, I also saw the message discipline when the hard topics came. Palestine. Fascism. Strongman politics. He spoke policy without making enemies of neighbours. Even though he is Gujarati and Punjabi, it was very Bengali: argue fiercely, eat together anyway.
The focus always returned to the two things New Yorkers count with their fingers: minutes and dollars. Faster buses give minutes back. Tenant protections check sudden rent spikes and save dollars. More childcare slots keep a mother in her job and make a father’s second shift possible. The ordinary sounds radical only when the ordinary has been denied for too long.
On election night outside a Yemeni café, Arabic beats slid into Bollywood hooks and then into a Bangla chorus. The footpath felt like Park Circus after rain with many tongues, one pavement, joy as the common tempo. Jackson Heights looked like Park Street the week before Puja. Everyone is suddenly on the same team.
Back at our Manhattan table in 2019 I had told Zohran a Kolkata truism. Revolutions are exaggerated in speeches and underwritten by municipal services. He laughed and took the point. For all its music and crowds, this campaign runs on the promise of outcomes.
New York will test it. Snow will come for the bus lane. A lawsuit will come for the tenant law. Outrage will try to fracture the coalition. But I know what happens when Bengalis decide a thing must happen. We show up at the same corner again and again until the light is fixed.
I have watched this campaign grow from a 2019 conversation to a citywide chorus. I am sentimental enough to believe politics should feel like home and practical enough to carry snacks. The lesson from this win is simple. Speak the language. Respect the palate. Keep the promise small and sturdy. Let the aunties lead. The rest will follow.
The route already knows its way, from Astoria to Jamaica and out to Bayswater with the tide. The revolution serves generous portions and speaks excellent Bangla.
Ruchira Gupta is a professor at New York University and author of I Kick and I Fly and The Freedom Seeker.