At very high energies, the partons in the nuclear wavefunction form a color glass condensate. Since the occupation number of partons in the color glass condensate is large, classical methods can be used to compute multi-particle production in the initial instants of a high energy heavy ion collision. Non-perturbative expressions are derived relating the distributions of produced partons to those of wee partons in the wavefunctions of the colliding nuclei. The time evolution of components of the stress-energy tensor is studied and the impact parameter dependence of elliptic flow is extracted. We discuss the space-time picture that emerges and interpret the RHIC data within this framework.