I've started calling Mummy from the fire escape. It's not romantic. It's just the only spot in my Bushwick apartment where the signal doesn't drop.
The time difference means I catch her in the morning while my midnight hums around me. She's just back from her walk. I'm wrapped in a blanket on rusted metal, watching the lights over the rooftops.
It was Navratri last week, and calling Mummy from the fire escape felt heavier than usual. She sent me a video of the garba in our society — all those swirling chaniya cholis, the dhol, the aunties who have never missed a beat in their lives.
I watched it twice and then I didn't watch it again because my chest did a thing.
"Beta, you ate something?" she asked. She always asks this first. It is her love language, her security check, her entire theology.
I lied and said yes. I'd had cereal for dinner over the sink like a raccoon with a design degree.
Here's the thing about homesickness nobody tells you. It's not constant. It ambushes you. It waits for a garba video, a certain song, the smell of someone frying something that isn't quite right but close enough.
Calling Mummy from the fire escape is how I hold it together. Her voice does what no therapist and no Trader Joe's cart has managed.
She told me about my cousin's engagement, the neighbour's new scooter, the mango tree in the back that fruited early. Small things. The smallness is the point.
Below me on the street some guys were laughing outside the bodega. A train screamed somewhere. New York kept being New York.
"You're happy there?" she asked, quieter this time.
And I said yes, and that one wasn't a lie. I am happy. I'm just happy and homesick at the same time, which apparently is a thing you can be. Nobody warned me about that either.
We hung up. The cold metal had numbed my legs. The city glowed on.
Some nights you need your whole chest. Some nights you just need your mother's voice through a bad connection.
Love,