A City of Light and a City of Darkness: How Sandy Created Two Manhattans Bebeto Matthews / AP Lower Manhattan goes dark during superstorm Sandy, on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012. One World Trade Center, center, remains brightly lit. In more than two decades of living in New York, I am not sure I experienced a moment stranger than what happened during a Tuesday night cab ride home from work. We were driving downtown on Fifth Avenue, past shuttered boutiques and crowds of meandering pedestrians, when, almost imperceptibly, everything went dark. At each corner, the ubiquitous streetlights and flashing walk-signs winked no more. Instead, a city of shadows loomed on all sides, illuminated only by whirring police sirens and the spectral glow of red flares planted in the ground by local authorities. The sidewalks emptied out. My cab driver, who had been speaking to a friend on his Bluetooth, made a startled laugh and lifted up his phone. His reception had vanished. I checked my gadgets and found them all equally useless. MORE: After Sandy: Scenes of Wreckage and Recovery We had entered what is effectively Manhattan's deadzone, where hundreds of thousands of residents are now in their third full day without electricity. It's a vast swathe of New York's downtown that encompasses the city's financial district, its trendiest restaurants as well as the epicenter of New York nightlife. It's also where I - alongside my family and myriad friends and colleagues - live. New York has always been a city of haves and have-nots, carved through by divides both real and imaginary. It emerged as a global metropolis not just in the rise of its gilded quarters, its tony boulevards and stately townhouses, but in the swarming chaos of its slums and sweatshops and teeming tenements. Daily existence here is still a journey through multiple New Yorks: entrenched ethnic neighborhoods and chic bourgeois melting pots, areas worn down by poverty and marginalization and others resplendent in their power and privilege. But, ever since Hurricane Sandy's storm surge on Oct. 29 flooded a major 14th Street power substation, there are only two New Yorks: a city of light and a city of dark. In the first, life after the hurricane is lurching fitfully back to normal. The power is on (in most cases, it never left), stores are open, the internet is working and folk pound the streets with the city's customary hustle and swagger. But the other, in particular Lower Manhattan, where power is expected back at the earliest this weekend, is an eerie ghost of itself. Candles flicker thinly from windowsills. The residents that remain walk in a hushed befuddlement. With no electricity, iffy water and scant cell phone service, the part of town that is usually New York's nerve center, its pulse, is now something altogether alien and detached. MORE: Capturing Sandy's East Coast Devastation Each morning since the hurricane, I've woken up in Lower Manhattan not to an alarm or car horns on the street, but to the overwhelmingly weird silence of this alternate reality. I scrub myself clean after heating water atop a gas stove, sip from a lukewarm bottle of orange juice, and then trudge down pitch-black flights of stairs with the lantern that is my dying iPhone. By the time I've emerged into the sunlight, I'm ready, almost, to start running away from zombies. Yet, 20 minutes and a shared cab later - this new tradition, itself, a kind of surreal act of post-cataclysm New Yorker bonhomie - I'm in Midtown, where Sandy has become, like every other horrible natural disaster in the world, just something that happened somewhere else. Friends who would wrinkle their noses at having to go north of Union Square are now refugees in their own city, huddled masses packed into buses headed uptown. On the coastal fringes of Lower Manhattan, residents from housing estates are pumping sludge water out of basements and running short of food - most shops are still closed. As the week drags on, there are fears of a full-blown public health crisis in one of the wealthiest districts in the world. Mind you, the situation is worse for many outside of Manhattan. On Tuesday night, as I tumbled out of the cab and groped through my satchel for a flashlight, the cab driver, an immigrant from Somalia, offered to lend me his. I declined, and for good reason. His house in Bayonne, New Jersey was without both power and water. He has two young children at home. "Just thinking about it right now makes me want to stop, turn around and go straight to them," he said with a sad smile. Whole stretches of Long Island, New Jersey and adjacent states will likely be without power well into next week. The cabbie from Somalia drove away and I clattered my way up five floors to check in on my mother's apartment. She, a professor at New York University and an inveterate Greenwich Villager, has so far refused to leave. A power cut is something she is accustomed to - in India, the periodic loss of electricity is a fact of life, met with a roll of the eyes, the snap of a match and the rapid filling of water basins. It's an inconvenience, a hassle, but you live with it, like you do traffic jams and cantankerous neighbors. I've tried to embrace my mother's zen, but can't. Slinking home beneath the eaves of Washington Square Park - the trees now monstrous black hulks - I know this won't last. But when the city of dark gets its light back, I wonder if I'll ever able to see it again without its shadow. MORE: Region Hit by Sandy Struggles to Resume Daily Life