We hadn't spoken properly in nine days, my mother and me.
Not a real fight. A slow one. The kind that starts because she asked when I'm coming home and I heard it as when am I going to stop wasting my life on fashion in a city that costs everything and gives back rent.
Calling home after a fight is its own kind of geometry. There's the ten and a half hour gap to solve for. There's the fact that morning for her is night for me. There's the whole ocean of things we don't say.
I called at 11pm my time, sitting on my fire escape in the Lower East Side with the whole block humming below me — someone's speaker on Ludlow, the halal cart on the corner, a couple arguing softly in Spanish.
She picked up on the third ring. "Beta, you ate?"
That's how we do it. In our family nobody says sorry. My mother says "you ate?" and it means I love you and I was scared and let's not talk about the thing. And I say "haan, khaana kha liya" even though I'd had a sad bowl of Maggi standing over the sink, and it means I forgive you and I miss you and I'm okay, mostly.
Calling home after a fight always breaks me open in the same place. Because she started telling me the mangoes were finished for the season, the last Alphonso boxes gone from the market, and how she'd wanted to send some with Papa's cousin who was visiting New York, but she missed the window.
I started crying on the fire escape over mangoes I would not have eaten. Over the version of me that would've been standing in her kitchen to receive them.
We didn't resolve anything. We never do, out loud. But by the end she was laughing about how my father can't work the new TV remote, and I was laughing too, and the LES was still humming, and somewhere between Ahmedabad morning and New York night we were fine again.
Homesickness isn't one big wave. It's a thousand small mangoes you weren't there for.
Call your mother. She's probably standing by the phone.
Love,