My friend Dev has a rooftop in Astoria. Not a fancy one — cracked concrete, a plastic chair, a view of the N train rattling past and, if you squint, the Manhattan skyline turning gold.
I went up there Tuesday evening to call my mother. It was morning for her, next-day already, which never stops feeling like a small science fiction. She was making tea. I could hear the pressure cooker whistling behind her voice.
Calling my mother from an Astoria rooftop has become my ritual when the homesickness gets loud. Something about being up high, above the noise, makes the distance feel less like a wound and more like a fact I can hold.
She asked if I was eating properly. I lied. She asked if I was wearing enough — in July, in a heatwave — because a mother's worry has no thermostat. I told her about the fashion week prep, and she said "beta, that's nice" in the way she says it when she doesn't fully understand my job but is proud anyway.
Then she went quiet and said the mogra was blooming in our balcony back home. And I lost it a little. Because I could almost smell it. That heavy sweet white-flower smell of Ahmedabad evenings, of my whole childhood, and here I was on a stranger's roof in Queens with a train screaming past.
Homesickness is not one big thing. It's a thousand small ones. It's mogra. It's the exact way she says my name. It's knowing that when I go back to visit, everyone will have moved on one notch in their lives and I'll have missed the small stuff — the everyday stuff you can't FaceTime your way into.
But here's what I've learned, sitting on rooftops calling my mother. Loving two places doesn't split you in half. It just makes your heart bigger and a little more tired.
The N train went by again. She said the tea was getting cold. We hung up and I stayed up there a while longer, letting the skyline do its slow gold thing.
Some nights you carry both cities. That's the deal, and I'd take it every time.
Love,