Sunday night in Astoria. The kind of humid where your skin and the air agree to be one thing. I sat on my fire escape because the apartment felt too small for my feelings, and I called Mumma.
It was Monday morning for her. She was making chai, I could hear the pressure cooker doing its little aggressive dance in the background, and something in me just cracked open.
Not a big dramatic cry. Just the quiet kind. The kind where you keep talking normally and hope she doesn't hear it in your voice. She always hears it.
"Khaana kha liya?" she asked. Have you eaten. The eternal question. The way Indian mothers say I love you without ever saying the actual words because the actual words are too much, too American, too direct.
Three years in New York and I still get blindsided by homesickness like this. People think it fades. It doesn't fade. It just learns to wait. It hides behind your busy weeks and your rooftop parties and your I'm-thriving texts, and then a pressure cooker whistles 7,000 miles away and there you are.
The homesickness is worst on Sundays. Something about the slowing down. During the week the city keeps me running — the trains, the deadlines, the constant low hum of doing. But Sunday strips all that away and I'm just a girl on a fire escape missing the specific yellow light of her mother's kitchen.
Downstairs on Steinway Street the hookah cafes were just waking up, the smell of grilled meat drifting up. Astoria does this thing where it feels like everywhere and nowhere, full of other people's homesickness too.
Mumma told me to wear a sweater even though it's June. I told her okay. We both knew I wouldn't.
We stayed on the line not really saying anything for a while. Just breathing in two different time zones.
The homesickness doesn't leave. You just build a bigger heart around it.
Call your mom. She's making chai and pretending she isn't waiting.
Love,