I called my mother on Sunday from the fire escape of my friend Deepa's building in Astoria, where I'd crashed after a long night, and homesickness snuck up on me the way it always does. Sideways. Uninvited.
It was the smell first. Someone downstairs was cooking with garlic and cumin, and for one second my whole body thought it was home.
My mother answered on the second ring the way she always does, like she's been holding the phone waiting. It was already Sunday night in Ahmedabad. She was folding laundry. I could hear the ceiling fan.
Homesickness is strange because it doesn't come when you expect it. Not on Diwali, not on my birthday. It comes on a random Sunday on a fire escape in Astoria while a stranger makes dinner three floors down.
She asked if I was eating properly. I lied and said yes. She asked if it was cold yet. I said soon. She held the phone up to show me the new curtains, moving too fast, and I got dizzy and laughed and told her to slow down, Mummy, slow down.
There is a specific loneliness to being loved this well from this far away. Homesickness is just love with nowhere to land.
Below me, the N train rumbled toward Ditmars. A kid was practicing basketball against a garage door. Astoria on a Sunday evening is all Greek grandfathers and Egyptian bakeries and the smell of ten different dinners, and I love it here, I do.
But I also wanted to reach through the screen and sit on my mother's bed and let her overfeed me.
We stayed on for forty minutes saying almost nothing. That's the good kind of call. The kind where the silence isn't empty, it's just distance being politely quiet.
Before she hung up she said, beta, homesickness means you have a home worth missing. Not everyone is so lucky.
I sat on that fire escape a while longer after we hung up. Let the garlic and cumin fill me up the rest of the way.
Some nights the whole city smells like somebody's mother.
Love,