After Midnight.(24/7 American lifestyle)(Brief Article)

Tharoor is the author, most recently, of the novel "Riot."

The other night the young lady in my life developed a craving for hot chocolate. The only problem was, it was well past midnight and there was no milk in the fridge. In a hundred other cities around the world, there could have been only one outcome to the story: no hot chocolate. Not here in New York. It was the work of a moment to trot downstairs and stroll to the corner supermarket, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was even able to pick up a packet of marshmallows to go with the young lady's drink.

Perhaps few aspects of modern American life are as startling to the outsider as the contemporary elimination of the clock as a source of limitations on the possible. In 1989 I moved to New York from Geneva, Switzerland, where many groceries actually closed for lunch and then shut their doors for the day at 6, well before I left work in the evening. My Swiss friends explained that shopping hours were based on the assumption that men had wives at home to shop for them; working women or male bachelors had to do their shopping on Saturday. (Stores were, of course, closed all day Sunday.) The convenience of living in America, a society where stores are open long hours on weekdays and both days on weekends, was unbelievably liberating.

Then it kept getting better. In the early 1990s enterprising Korean immigrants added the luxury of the all-night greengrocer, where bleary- eyed New Yorkers could drown their thirsts if not their sorrows--and pick up essential supplies, from a sandwich to a bouquet of roses, at the same time. As the nocturnal population of "the city that never sleeps" embraced the 24-hour greengrocers, the supermarket chains realized they could not afford to lose out on this clientele. Today, the sun never sets on the New York supermarket.

Older Americans tell me this is new for them, too. "Sure, you could find a Sunday paper at the corner drugstore, and maybe get a soda pop at the fountain," one octogenarian friend explained, "but otherwise everything used to be closed on Sunday." It seems hard to believe today, but America used to be a more religious society, in which the Fourth Commandment's injunction to observe the seventh day as the Sabbath was taken very seriously, and people went to church or stayed at home. Until the 1960s it was illegal in most American states to sell alcohol on a Sunday. But that, as Americans like to say, was then.

Declining religiosity in public life ...